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LPCAMM2 Is Finally Here, and It’s a Big Deal
(discuss.tchncs.de)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Can someone give me short sentences that an non-nerd understand?
Maybe in a near future you'll once again be able to upgrade your laptop RAM whenever you want. The current trend is for RAM to more and more be soldered onto the motherboard which prevents you from upgrading it.
AFAIK with Apple it is even part of the SoC, not even soldered.
Part of the SoC makes a lot of sense but I'd still like to have an expansion option. Or, well, actually, maybe connecting it up via PCIe might be sufficient, latency is going to take a serious hit but if there's gigabytes of HBM on the chip acting essentially as cache it's probably fine for pretty much all practical workloads. Gigantic memory requirements don't tend to come with purely random access patterns.
OTOH that definitely puts the "N" in "NUMA". I doubt any OS but Linux could deal with the thing sanely.
Laptop ram hasn't changed in 25 years, the slots are bulky and not efficient. New laptops need ram closer to the CPU, so they are soldering them on the board, fast and efficient but not upgradable. New slot, more efficient, upgradable, better for consumers so hopefully laptops use this new standard.
These newer modules are lower profile than SODIMM, and do not carry the same frequency/ throughput and latency limitations. LPCAMM effectively eliminates the need to solder RAM to mobile platform main boards, though we'll see how vendors react.