One thing that has always bothered me is the E-waste from having to upgrade motherboards and components. With many new CPUs going with North and South bridge on CPU, a modular motherboard would be better and make it easier to upgrade key components while keeping other still functional components. I’ve included a very basic mockup of what I think such a system would look like for both a laptop and desktop.
2 Likes
Wouldn’t this make the laptop really thick?
There are some challenges I see with it, such as CPU sockets (along with a desktop chip that isn’t soldered which will really make it really thick and limit options anyway), PCIe lanes with their traces, there would be issues with cooler mounting (due to the back plates) and you would be severely restricted due to the the recent trend of CPU higher power consumption and limited by cooling you can pack into such a form factor, which restricts the CPU options unless you run everything in ECO mode.
Battery life would be horrible too. Unless you are gonna go the route of those desktop replacement/gaming laptops.
A closer comparison I think you would be looking at is something like Intel’s NUC.
Well this is an example of modularity. In a laptop soldered CPU and CAMM could be used in this, and the CAMM location and M.2 location would make it way more efficient. It’s why Dell introduced CAMM for their laptops in the first place. It wouldn’t make it very thick either. The total thickness of the CAMM CPU module is just 20 mm, that’s less than 1 inch in thickness. With the heatsink and heatpipes and cross airflow design of the fan, it’d be at 1 inch thickness max. However, I envision such modularity for the motherboard and socket being the future for all computers. So when you upgrade your computer to a new CPU you only replace the CPU module and not the other modules. It’d make upgrading laptops easier as well, allowing you to keep the config of your laptop, while replacing only a single unit.
1 Like