Ugh, finally. And it's not just a repurposed desktop memory standard either! The overall space requirements look to be similar to the BGA that you'd normally solder on (perhaps 2-3x as thick?). I'm sure they can reduce that overhead going forward.
I love the disclosure at the bottom:
Full Disclosure: iFixit has prior business relationships with both Micron and Lenovo, and we are hopelessly biased in favor of repairable products.
This is fantastic news. Hopefully the cost to manufacturers is only marginal and they find a suitable replacement for their current "each tier in RAM comes with a 5-20% price bump" pricing scheme.
Too bad apple is almost guaranteed to not adopt the standard. I miss being able to upgrade the ram in macbooks.
I remember when Dell was the first to introduce [1] these Compression Attached Memory Modules in their laptops in an attempt to move away from soldered-on RAM. Glad this is now being more widely adopted and standardized.
[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/693366/dell-defends-its-cont...
Cant wait to see this in a framework laptop
A bit of a disingenious argument intended to sell this as being more revolutionary than it really is --- BGA sockets already exist for LPDDR as well as other things like CPUs/SoCs, but they're very expensive due to low volumes. If the volume went up, they'd go down in price significantly just like LGA sockets for CPUs have.
I wonder if this will bring a new widely available high-performance connector to the wider market. SO-DIMM connectors have been occasionally repurposed to other uses, most notably by Raspberry Pi Compute Models 1-3 among other similar SOM/COM boards. RPi CM4 switched to 2x 100pin mezzanine connectors; maybe some future module could use CAMM connectors, I'd imagine they are capable enough
So this is going into the ThinkPad P1 (Gen 7), which is too expensive and power hungry for my use cases. How long until it filters down into less expensive SKUs? Are we talking next years generation?
Ifixit also links to a repair guide:
Remember that Haswell laptops were the last to feature socketed CPUs.
RAM is nice to upgrade, for sure. As well as an SSD, but CPUs are still a must. I would even suggest upgradeable GPUs but I don't think the money is there for the manufacturers. Why allow you to upgrade when you can buy a whole new laptop?
The current Dell version of this: upgrade to 64GB is $1200. Found this the hard way when trying to get my engineering team what I thought would be a $200 upgrade per machine from their stock 32GB Precision laptop workstations.
Can it become loose then suddenly not have all pins attached properly? This is something that's unlikely to happen with SODIMM slots, but I've seen so many times when screw receptacles fail.
> LPDDR operates at lower voltages compared to DDR, giving it the edge in power efficiency. But, the lower voltage makes signal integrity between the memory and processor challenging,
Why can't the signaling channels use a higher voltage and control circuitry on the memory stick step up and step down the gain to access the memory module?
I see no mention of ECC.
It worries me.
Is it possible to have both LPDDR and LPCAMM2 in use at the same time?
Would it be possible to have LPCAMM2 as external device tru thunderbolt?
What's wrong with DIMM?
Yes please. Also, can we haz ECC?
I would welcome something like Raspberry Pi compute module, that contains CPU+RAM and communicates with other parts via PCIE. This standard can last decades!
Yet another standard for memory will just fail.
Meanwhile Apple bakes the RAM,CPU,GPU all into the same "chip". Good luck with that.
Apple hates it
On the other hand, with a reflow station everything becomes modular and repairable.
I do hope that a more widespread usage of compressed attachment gives us some development in that area where projects that were promising modular devices failed (remember those 'modular' phone concepts? available physical interconnects were one of the failures...). Sockets for BGAs have existed for a while, but were not really end-user friendly (not that LGA or PGA are that amazing), so maybe my hope is misplaced and many-contact connections will always be worse than direct attachment (be it PCB or SiP/SoC/CPU shared substrate).
I'm sure this will find use in Business-Class "Mobile workstations", but having integrated DDR4 in my own hardware, I have a hard time seeing this as the mainstream path forward for mobile computing.
There's lots of value in tight integration. Improved signal integrity (ie, faster), improved reliability, better thermal flow, smaller packaging, and lower cost. Do I really want to compromise all of those things just to make RAM upgrades easier?
And how many times do I need to upgrade the RAM in a laptop, really? Twice? Why make all those sacrifices to use a connector, instead of just reworking the DRAM parts? A robotic reflow machine is not so complex that a small repair shop couldn't afford one, which is what you see if you to to parts of the world where repair is taken seriously. Why do I need to be able to do it at home? I can't re-machine my engine at home. It's the most advanced nanotechnology humanity can produce, why is a $5k repair setup unreasonable?
This is not to mention the direction things are really going, DRAM on Package/Die. The signaling speed and bus widths possible with co-packaged memory and HBM are impossible to avoid, and I'm not going to complain about the fact that I can't upgrade the RAM separately from the CPU, any more than I complain about not being able to upgrade my L2 cache today. The memory is part of the compute, in the same way the GPU memory is part of the GPU.
I hope players like iFixit and Framework aren't too stubborn in opposing the tight integration of modern platforms. "Repairable" doesn't need to mean the same thing it did 10 years ago, and there are so many repairability battles that are actually worth fighting, that being stubborn about the SOTA isn't productive.
I’m glad they explained why RAM has become soldered to the board recently. It’s easy to be cynical and assume they were doing it for profit motive purposes (which might be a nice side effect), but it’s good to know that there’s also a technical reason to solder it. Even better to know that it’s been recognized and a solution is being worked on.