IMO in light of the EU mandating that all consumer, medical, and vehicular electronic devices have user-serviceable batteries and USB-C ports I believe we should lobby the FCC to mandate that all laptops have at least one SODIMM RAM slot and upgradable storage!
Maybe not SODIMM speciffically, that standard is on it’s last leg but mandating replacable ram would be neat. Though soldered or hell even on soc memory like the m1 chips do have actual advantages so idk how I feel about it.
Personally I value replaceable memory highly but unlike batteries and usb-c ports it’s not really a wear item and there are actual benefits to it not being replaceable (I am talking performance and battery life advantages not making waterproof devices slightly easier) so that would actually negatively affect what could be done.
If camm memory actually works out and turns out to have no drawbacks, full steam ahead XD
Why not mandate an optional RAM expansion slot, and let manufacturers still use soldered memory? Best of both worlds. In fact, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a dock which had a dedicated GPU and RAM expansion, but the mobile segment was just soldered memory and on-board graphics?
With current memory controllers all ram has to run at the same speed.
So if you have soldered ram it can all run at a higher speed, however if you have a mix of soldered and replaceable then it is all limited to the lower speed of the replaceable ram (but doesn’t get the full benefit of replaceable as some can’t be replaced).
Making that actually work well would require new and more expensive memory controllers as well as better software support for using the faster ram first. (Which based on the inconsistent performance of flex mode I doubt would work well anytime soon, flex mode is using two sticks with different capacity but otherwise equivalent specs)
Ok, well neither the best nor worst of both worlds then… When on-the-go you use only the soldered RAM. When on the doc you use the modular RAM, and get slightly speed restricted but like… 10x more RAM.
Something like this would probably require CXL(cxl.mem and cxl.cache protocols). Moreover you’ll get reduced performance, not just because of reduced bandwidth but also increased latency. In the past there was already someone that tried to implement swap on a pcie device but with limited results at best.
Gotta agree with kyle here, that’s just worse in pretty much all aspects.
There are technologies for external ram like cxl but that’s more for servers and doesn’t even seem to get much traction there.
Might as well just have more ram all the time, not to mention that the external stuff is almost certainly going to be massively slower and higher latency.
There is also the bit where you will need to prepare for undocking which does remove a lot of the benefits of docking for most users.
LPCAMM gives you all the benefits of soldered ram (appart from being somewhat more expensive for the manufacturer and not allowing them to charge sky high margin for higer ram models) with pretty much all of the benefits of sodimms.