Compression Attached Memory Modules may make upgradable laptops a thing again

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/compression-attached-memory-modules-may-make-upgradable-laptops-a-thing-again/

by WithinReason • 3 years ago

68 114 3 years ago

chx7• 3 years ago

Most PC makers and laptop PC buyers made an unspoken bargain in the early- to mid-2010s, around when the MacBook Air and the Ultrabook stopped being special thin-and-light outliers and became the standard template for the mainstream laptop: We would jettison nearly any port or internal component in the interest of making a laptop that was thinner, sleeker, and lighter.

Nah, most PC makers have fallen hook, line and sinker for Steve Jobs' trick of pulling the Macbook Air out of an envelope and destroyed the PC laptop industry as was his plan. Making lighter laptops do not require thinner laptops -- well before Jobs' trick I had a Panasonic CF-Y5 which was a 14" 1.5kg laptop and yet it included a DVD burner. It was not thin for sure. This thin craze is only making worse laptops because you have no space for cooling, ports and keyboard travel.

eviks• 3 years ago

Indeed, and you could even make it lighter by removing the DVD burner if you didn't need it (in some models)! Or make it heavier by replacing DVD with an extra hard drive if that was the worthy tradeoff for you

fomine32• 3 years ago

Or external battery bay, it was a thing.

inkyoto3• 3 years ago

Nah, the trend had started some time before, and Intel is complicit due to limiting the maximum amount of RAM at the chipset level. I am not sure whether it was a technological or a marketing constraint.

I have a Sony Vaio VGN-Z17 laptop that I purchased in 2008 in a mint condition that now runs Linux. It has 4Gb of RAM, which – I think – is the maximum, and it can't be upgraded any further due to the chipset not allowing such a thing. Everything else (apart from the 32-bit CPU)… is still a marvel: a 1.4 kg masterpiece with a carbon fibre body, 2x GPU's (discrete Intel and NVIDIA chips), a fingerprint scanner, a 1300x900 TNT screen (okay, low res by modern standards), up to 11 hours of the uptime with a swappable large battery, plus other peripherals expected and usual of the era. Everything still works like a charm.

Memory can't be upgraded tho. Intel has held laptops vendors hostage for far too long by not supporting more in the chipset. It should not come as a surprise that the laptop vendors have started soldering memory chips on.

aurareturn• 3 years ago

If the CPU is 32 bit, then the max RAM can only be 4GB.

Sakos• 3 years ago

Core 2 Duos might have been more limited than they maybe could have been, but the 2006-2008 era was still very much transitional. DDR2 was still extremely common and you weren't going to find any 4GB modules. The next architecture was Arrandale (the first Core i3/5/7 line) where the max was increased to 8GB and the Sandy Bridge (probably the minimum I'd consider for doing anything with modern applications or a modern OS) supported 16-32GB. If they held anything hostage, they certainly didn't do it for long.

I also think it's ridiculous to consider this in a vacuum. The few AMD laptops I could find from the same time frame have the same memory limits.

Milner08• 3 years ago

I am really not sure how much of the general population would agree with you. Having a slim laptop that I can drop in my bag and not take up the world of space is great.

atoav• 3 years ago

I have a laptop that is 25mm in height. It fits my bag perfectly. It could be 30mm and would still fit fine.

We are not talking about making laptops not fit into bags. We are talking about not making laptops 9mm thin when they would work better if they were 18mm thin.

wiz21c• 3 years ago

I want my laptop made of things I can upgrade/replace. Which means stuff that is less optimized for space.

kevincox2• 3 years ago

Personally I agree. Maybe I'm a relatively big and strong person but weight has very little impact on me. Sure, if I am trying to one-hand it is nice, but that is a pretty rare scenario for me. If the laptop is in a desk or in a bag weight makes a very, very small difference. However every bit of saved volume is appreciated each time I put it into my backpack.

Although for me there are still bigger priorities than size such as I/O, battery, durability and upgradability. But I'll take extra weight over size any day.

saagarjha• 3 years ago

Most laptops of the time were light because they were flimsy; MacBook Air was aluminum. How did yours fare?

chx7• 3 years ago

It was a magnesium alloy and practically indestructible. Alas, I did test it -- it got kicked off a table while open in a very cramped multi story flat during a hackathon -- but it survived with a minor scratch on the lid. Did I mention it was a Panasonic Toughbook?

threeseed2• 3 years ago

It's funny how out of touch you are.

At CES this year even the gaming laptops have moved away from thicker, boxier designs capable of housing elaborate cooling systems and a full array of ports. And instead resemble traditional thin laptops.

The reason is that the majority of people want sleek, thin, usable form factors that isn't out of place in a cafe or library. And it is the priority over all else.

lpapez• 3 years ago

I agree. If I wanted max power and cooling efficiency, I'd go for a PC anyway. When picking a laptop, my first question is whether I would be able to carelessly carry it around every day.

The compromise with bulky gaming laptops is simply not worth IMO - it's not as good of a desktop computer as an actual desktop, and not as good of a laptop as some notebook. It's nice to be ocassionally able to do something more serious while on the go, but that is optimizing for the 10% use-case instead of the 90% use-case.

nkrisc• 3 years ago

I assumed it was because those bulky gaming laptops were the worst of both worlds.

chx7• 3 years ago

The reason is that the majority of people want sleek, thin

That's what they are told and that's what they are sold.

You can't compete with a billion dollar marketing machinery by saying "hey my machine is not 9mm but 25mm but in turn it runs cooler and doesn't require dongles".

LoganDark2• 3 years ago

This thin craze is only making worse laptops because you have no space for cooling, ports and keyboard travel.

Agreed. I'd be fine if there were other laptops in the market but there really are not. If you want a laptop that makes good use of its internal space, and has any internal space to make use of in the first place, you're going to be paying thousands.

Someone• 3 years ago

I think that’s not an evil conspiracy, but because the demand just isn’t there in sufficient numbers at lower price points.

For most people, making good use of available space means leaving as little room as possible inside. At best, you can replace your SSD or RAM with higher capacity ones.

cameronh902• 3 years ago

I buy laptops for end-users and the number one thing they all want, developers included, is for the laptop to be light and thin. To the detriment of everything else.

They'll complain that they're slow, hot, the battery doesn't last, etc. but when I suggest a thicker laptop instead, they'll turn it down.

dangus3• 3 years ago

Once you know that it’s technically possible to have your cake and eat it too (the Apple M1/M2/M3 chip), this becomes a reasonable demand. The MacBook Air released in 2020 with no fan was managing to match and beat the 2019 Intel 16” MacBook Pro in some benchmarks, and that 16” model was itself thicker than the previous model.

A lot of people giving up upgradability to join Apple (this isn’t hyperbole: their marketshare notably increased after the M1 debut) getting double the battery life of their last Intel system are making a very logical and reasonable trade-off. When it comes to traveling and getting work done, whether or not I can upgrade the system might take a back seat to whether or not the system hurts my back. The whole point of a laptop is to make a reasonable trade-off for mobility.

Of course, that said, it’s true that Apple could provide us with at least a storage upgrade path without any compromise. Memory is debatable since LPDDR has real efficiency benefits. But someone who wants what you can get out of an M3 Max laptop can’t buy that package anywhere else at any price.

What x86 system comes in a 14” portable notebook package with ~20 hours of productivity battery life and on-board graphics only 7% slower than a laptop RTX 4080 that can be configured to address over 100GB of VRAM?

Thankfully for consumer choice, Intel’s Core Ultra products finally caught up to the type of performance per watt standard that Apple set.

Aurornis• 3 years ago

This is a great example of how Hacker News comment section preferences do not represent the general population’s preferences.

If you’ve ever worked in purchasing or IT, you see how much people who travel or move around value thin, small, and light notebooks.

If you’ve used modern thin, light notebooks, you’ve seen how little it matters for performance and battery life. A modern Apple laptop is tiny and performs extremely well.

Upgradeable RAM is a very niche demand. If your goals are simultaneously to keep a machine forever while minimizing upfront cost, then compromising form to make RAM upgradeable is a reasonable decision. However, most people just want an all-new laptop come upgrade time because CPUs and GPUs are advancing rapidly. People who know they’re going to keep the laptop forever will spend an extra couple hundred on RAM up front.

I think HN has also lost sight of how the average laptop user operates. Even I had an 8GB RAM secondary Apple laptop for testing and it worked completely fine for a mix of day to day tasks and coding. I wasn’t going to be doing Chromium compiles in the background while cycling through 100 background tabs in Chrome, but for even moderate usage with Chrome and Electron apps and an IDE it was fine.

I had a Panasonic CF-Y5 which was a 14" 1.5kg laptop and yet it included a DVD burner. It was not thin for sure. This thin craze is only making worse laptops because you have no space for cooling, ports and keyboard travel.

I suspect a lot of these perspectives are anchored to past realities: Laptops from 5-10 years ago where carrying a jumbo laptop did actually have significant advantages. Times have changed and all of the anecdotes from ancient laptops or even 2010-era laptops just don’t apply.

chx7• 3 years ago

where carrying a jumbo laptop did actually have significant advantages.

it's bewildering to call the engineering marvel those Panasonic and Sony laptops me and a few others talk about here "jumbo". It's been more than 17 years and the only physical advantage of the Macbook M3 Pro 14" over the CF-Y5 is the thickness change. That's it. Near two decades of advancement, the laptop is the same weight except it went from 1.3"-1.9" to 0.61" thickness. It's been 3.7 lbs then, 3.4 pounds now with the Max being 3.6 lbs and I bet merely dropping the DVD writer would've been enough bring these to par. Jumbo...? The Dell XPS M2010 was a jumbo, that's not in question but these?

move around value thin, small, and light notebooks.

We are on the same page about light. Let me tell you, I was not happy how much heavier my next laptop, the ThinkPad T420 was at 4.9lbs. That's a full third heavier. No, it's the demand for insane thinness that I argue was manufactured artificially. If you want smaller laptops, there were, back then, both from Panasonic and Sony as they used to call them, subnotebooks, at 11" and 12" size with the exact same argument possible.

akagusu• 3 years ago

Upgradeable RAM is a very niche demand. If your goals are simultaneously to keep a machine forever while minimizing upfront cost, then compromising form to make RAM upgradeable is a reasonable decision. However, most people just want an all-new laptop come upgrade time because CPUs and GPUs are advancing rapidly. People who know they’re going to keep the laptop forever will spend an extra couple hundred on RAM up front.

I work with IT support and I can tell you upgradeable RAM is NOT a very niche demand. Upgrade RAM is the 1st thing users ask when their computer are becoming slow and believe me, they always get very upset when they find out their laptops don't have an expansion slot.

bryanlarsen• 3 years ago

Thin is sexy, light is useful. People who don't stop and think about it generally associate thin with light simply because small things are lighter as a general rule. But for laptops, it could well be an inverse relationship: a light laptop may require a stronger, heavier material.

And thinness is pretty useless. a 1" thick laptop takes roughly the same amount of space in your bag as a 0.6" thin macbook air, but weight you notice on your shoulder after lugging it through airports for a few hours.

It's a pick 2 of 3 situation: 2 of thin, light and expandable. Only 2 of those 3 are useful features.

It's the same issue with material: a high quality plastic can have exactly the right amount of plasticity so that it's neither too brittle nor too flexible so that it provides maximum protection when dropped, while still being light. But plastic isn't sexy.

screye2• 3 years ago

I genuinely wonder why HN people care so much about laptop upgradeability.

It is your primary and likely only tool in a profession where everyone makes 6 figures.

Spending an extra 3000$ every 3 years doesn't sound all that bad, as far as professional spending goes.

Consultants spend more on suits every year.

killingtime74• 3 years ago

Does the writer really think laptops are not upgradeable because of technical issues? Laptop makers convice people to buy more computer than they need as they can't be upgraded, making more money and waste in the process.

fsflover• 3 years ago

This. I've just upgraded RAM to 64 GB on my Librem 14 laptop.

AnonCoward422• 3 years ago

I also made the observation that more expensive laptops tend to have fewer replaceable parts vs the cheaper models. There is clearly also a manufacturer difference. Out of all the OEMs it's HP that often offers laptop with replaceable memory (especially on the low end).

Playing devil's advocate it might be that the more compact you try to make a laptop the less servicable it gets. I don't buy it tho.

josephg• 3 years ago

I hear what you’re saying, but AI makes memory bandwidth much more important in computers. As I understand it, it’s much easier to increase memory bandwidth by soldering ram adjacent to the CPU - like GPUs have been doing for decades.

Of course it’s suspicious that computer manufacturers can make more money in the process. But that doesn’t invalidate the technical argument.

If this standard solves the technical problem, I’m all for it. We’ll have to wait and see which manufacturers adopt it.

grishka• 3 years ago

AI has been around for how many years, and it's still as niche and gimmicky as it's ever been. Especially the heavyweight kind that does need that bandwidth.

The only "AI" feature I use on macOS with any kind of regularity is the built-in OCR to copy text from images. But then my weak-ass Pixel 4a can do the same thing in the app switcher, so I assume it needs neither a fast CPU nor high-bandwidth memory.

thih92• 3 years ago

Note that this works both ways.

When the manufacturers figure out how to introduce upgradable laptops in a way that brings them more money, they will allow and encourage that.

Imagine a laptop subscription, where you pay the full cost of a laptop each year and receive parts to upgrade.

segfaultbuserr• 3 years ago

It's a combination of both aspects.

The first point is that LPDDR5 chip's operating frequency today has reached an all-time high of 9600 MT/s, and the latest off-the-shelf laptops (Intel Meteor Lake) are running at 7467 MT/s. This kind of high bandwidth is especially preferred in laptops for improved graphics and gaming performance. The iGPU has to compete with CPU for system DRAM bandwidth (which is already only a fraction of what a dedicated GPU has), every GB/s helps. Meanwhile, SO-DIMM is hitting its physical speed limit due to signal integrity issues (I heard that the impedance mismatch at the connector is too great to go faster). So yes, if you want high operating frequency, soldered RAM is the only option.

The second point is that, it's not always needed for every laptop, of course it's just a matter of tradeoff, many users would prefer lower DRAM bandwidth in exchange for better upgradability. On the other hand, hardware vendors can use this technical limitation as a justification to design machines with non-upgradable memory. You hit two birds with one stone: you can achieve better performance and force customers to pay extra for RAM at the same time.

If CAMM sees mass adoption, it's still up to the vendor to decide if they're willing to actually provide upgradability - but at least it'll be made possible at the technical level.

nuriaion2• 3 years ago

There is an issue if you want to create a small laptop with a long battery life as SODIMM will use more space and power as LPDDR. (The SODIMM module and connector are very bulky and have a bad electical layout. CRAMM will be somewhere between the two)

rcxdude• 3 years ago

Technical reasons certainly play a part in it. Thin and light and high performance is objectively harder with the currend SODIMM arrangement for replacable RAM. And it's not a slam-dunk win for the laptop manufacturers financially either, because it makes their manufacturing output less fungible for them as well. If they misestimate the demand for one particular configuration that loses them money.

DSMan195276• 3 years ago

Laptop makers convice people to buy more computer than they need as they can't be upgraded, making more money and waste in the process.

Honestly I don't think that really factors into it, simply because the vast majority of buyers have no idea what they need to begin with and really don't care about upgradability as a consequence. Why are they supposed to care about whether the RAM can be upgraded when they don't know what the RAM does or how much is a reasonable amount? (and let's not even mention different speeds...)

Dalewyn2• 3 years ago

Frankly, the average customer does not need to be concerned with RAM speed. If he doesn't know, he doesn't need fast RAM.

RAM capacity on the other hand is something everyone needs to care about, because having insufficient RAM brings the entire computer to a screeching halt. Being blunt, I consider it a travesty that computer vendors are selling machines with 8GB of RAM today. 16GB is the new minimum for practical use, with how bloated Windows, Chrome, and honestly everything is getting.

Don't get me started any further on why we even need at least 16 gigabytes of RAM to do the same things we were doing with 16 megabytes back in the day. Bloody insane, this timeline is.

iSnow• 3 years ago

Of course it's both but if you look at Apple's M1-M3, which are a SOC combining CPU, GPU and RAM, you can see it has technological merit. The things are known to be real fast.

jsheard• 3 years ago

This model forces users to accept the overpriced RAM and SSD options the manufacturer offers as well, previously you could buy the base model and swap in cheap parts but not anymore. The mark-ups are obscene, for example Apple charges $800 for a 2TB SSD when a top-of-the-line 2TB PCIe4 NVMe drive can be had for $140 at retail, or even cheaper if you settle for something just "very fast" instead of "extremely fast".

senectus1• 3 years ago

My current laptop (Dell Precision 7670) had flashing light error on the other day, that the Dell support paper suggested was potentially "loose ram".

So I turned it upside down and opened it up and to my interest/curiosity I found this RAM (CAMM) in it.

its a very interesting design. What I do find interesting is that there is no extra slot for more ram. so if /when i decide i want more than the 16GB I need to remove the existing. which is only slightly better than soldered ram in my opinion.

krzat• 3 years ago

If RAM comes loose often enough that support paper mentions it, it's not a good sign.

actionfromafar• 3 years ago

Too bad they didn't solder it in place.

londons_explore2• 3 years ago

So specifically, the problem here is that the contacts are made by tiny spring connectors on the motherboard. They 'spring' a distance of about 0.2 mm - which accounts for bending or flexing of each board. However, if the screws aren't tight, then perhaps 0.1mm of your 0.2mm range is wasted, and the RAM might work until the motherboard is bent or flexed and then it'll stop working.

End result: You have a laptop that crashes whenever you pick it up from the 'wrong' corner.

AnonCoward422• 3 years ago

its a very interesting design. What I do find interesting is that there is no extra slot for more ram. so if /when i decide i want more than the 16GB I need to remove the existing. which is only slightly better than soldered ram in my opinion.

Changing only the memory vs changing the whole laptop with battery, motherboard (incl. CPU/GPU), display, chassis seems at least an order of magnitude better. It was maybe meant hyperbolic, but I want to make clear that having the option to replace memory is really a lot better than soldered memory.

adrian_b• 3 years ago

The CAMM socket has an 128-bit/144-bit interface, so it is equivalent with 2 SODIMM sockets.

Even if with 2 SODIMM sockets you could populate or upgrade only 1 socket, the performance could be much worse than when using and replacing a matched pair of modules.

I have never used mismatched memory modules and many others do likewise, so if you want the best performance it does not matter that there is a single CAMM socket, it just makes the replacement simpler.

secondcoming• 3 years ago

My Dell Precision 7750 came with 8GB but I was able to upgrade it to 128GB with cheaper after-market RAM. There were two RAM slots on the front of the motherboard and two more on the other side, which required me removing the keyboard to access.

xnzakg• 3 years ago

In my experience most laptops that did have more than one slot would usually have both filled with smaller modules from the factory in order to use two lanes instead of one, so you would need to remove the existing memory to upgrade anyway. Also, if there standard catches on it should be much easier to buy modules.

schmorptron• 3 years ago

For laptops with two DIMM slots you would usually want both populated anyways for dual-channel ram speeds. CAMM does dual channel with one module.

I'm wondering whether amd or intel will match apple on a future platform, who have been using 4 or more channels in their newer macbooks.

twic• 3 years ago

What does the "Compression" in the name mean? Is it compressing data, RAM Doubler style? Or does it mean the physical form factor is smaller? Or what?

wheybags• 3 years ago

I would guess "compressing" the pins against pads, like tightening down a traditional lga desktop cpu

isilofi• 3 years ago

There are flat-ish contact surfaces on the bottom of the module that are compressed by a bracket onto the corresponding contact surfaces of the motherboard.

nuriaion2• 3 years ago

It's physically pressed down to the pads on the motherboard with screws.

dtgriscom• 3 years ago

RAM Doubler

Wow! Blast from the past!

londons_explore2• 3 years ago

So, laptop motherboards are say 2mm thick, with components about 2mm on either side, all except 'tall' components like power electronics and things with heatsinks.

Ram chips (~2mm thick) are soldered onto a board 2 mm thick, which uses 1mm spring contacts onto the motherboard.

Total height: 5mm above the motherboard.

So this CAMM system doesn't seem to actually solve the height or board area problem that was causing manufacturers to solder RAM directly.

farmdve• 3 years ago

I still dread the fact that 15 inch laptops are the norm and not the exception for a 17 inch one.

_ZeD_• 3 years ago

that's the main reason I'm sticking to an lg gram

Neil44• 3 years ago

No it's absolutely not close to correct that most mainstream computer systems don't have upgradeable RAM as stated in this article. Source: I have an IT company.

I can see that saving a mm or two with this form factor would be advantageous though. Slots change every few years anyway - DDR3, DDR4, DDR5 all have physically incompatible slots so moving to this new saystem isn't that big a logical change.

williamcotton3• 3 years ago

Tangential, but the soldered on flash hard drives are a terrible choice on Apple’s part. Yes, sure, backup frequently, but not being able to retrieve your data because of locking a consumer into overpriced commodity storage is a real jerk move.

kevincox2• 3 years ago

To be fair these drives are encrypted with HSM (Secure Enclave) keys anyways. So even if you could extract them they would be useless. One could argue that for most users making 6 digit pins secure is more valuable than being able to recover their data from a broken device.

acdha7• 3 years ago

You be wouldn’t be able to anyway because they use encryption to prevent your data being compromised by the guy who stole your laptop. This is a tricky balance but it’s also never been easier to have backup so I think this is the right balance for most people.

williamcotton3• 3 years ago

Wouldn't it be just as safe if it was possible to print out a backup key?

Jemm• 3 years ago

I look forward to hardware capacity as a subscription. Won't be long before someone does it, cough cough Akkle

Razengan2• 3 years ago

People talk about "e-waste" regarding non-upgradeable computers; do you think upgrading a computer generates no waste? What happens to the old part? Does it always find a new home? Eventually there's always going to be a part that gets thrown away.

With non-upgradeable/self-contained/all-in-one computers, when you buy a new one, the old one continues to be perfectly usable on its own, unlike a standalone RAM stick or SDD or video card or..

Razengan2• 3 years ago

Not to mention the individual packaging, printed material and cooling sinks/fans for each of those separate parts.

DonnyV2• 3 years ago

I miss the days where you could upgrade your laptop. I had a dell back in 2010, that I updated its ram and wifi card. Which gave me a budget to update my home wifi also with an extended drive. So the money I would of spent on a new laptop I ended upgrading my home network and speeding up my laptop. True freedom to do what you want with your tech.

zamadatix• 3 years ago

They, particularly Dell, have never stopped making laptops with upgradeable storage, RAM, and Wi-Fi - hence Dell being the first ones mentioned using this new module in the article. If you self select to a model with a few mm less thickness instead that's your choice of trade off and it's really more freedom to do what you want instead of less.

Here's a random modern mid-range Dell with swappable m.2 storage, 2.5" SATA storage, m.2 Wi-Fi slot, and battery https://www.newegg.com/black-dell-inspiron-3520-mainstream/p.... If you're more adventurous you can often upgrade the screen as well but only like part replacement is intended for that.

This isn't unique to the mid price range or Dell or particularly rare. The main exception is modern MacBooks as there is only one provider for portable Macs and they went all in on integration (to some pros as well as the obvious cons).

DonnyV2• 3 years ago

I stopped buying Dells years ago. The problem I was having with them was quality control. I got burned on a couple Dell purchases and just stopped buying them. I bought a MSI Stealth in 2014 and still have it. I've never had a problem with it. Great aluminum body build and top notch components.

Compression Attached Memory Modules may make upgradable laptops a thing again

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