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Comment by okasaki | Hacker News Reader

So are they going to be reversing their trend of soldering the ram? Most of their laptops have soldered ram now.

Soldering the RAM to the board has performance advantages which must be addressed before we reverse the trend. LPCAMM promised similar (only slightly worse than soldered) performance/energy characteristics as soldered LPDDR5X and is said to be launching in 2024 so hopefully we get replaceable RAM back in 3~5 years.

They were soldering RAM on well before there were performance advantages - actually there were often performance disadvantages as the soldered on RAM was often a slower speed tier than what you could get cheaply just a few years later.

So the "lets solve that before we can swap-able RAM" argument doesn't really fly.

There are also Performance advantages to soldering the ram directly to the CPU die. So make the whole CPU with ram on it swappable then?

The industry does not accept regression.

It's okay back then cause what you described is not a regression when they happened - "a few years later" doesn't count, most people don't buy laptop for upgradability.

For the last two DDR generations, we have:

- During the early days of DDR4: (soldered) LPDDR4-3200 vs (socketed) SO-DIMM DDR4-2400

- During the late days of DDR4: (soldered) LPDDR4-4266 vs (socketed) SO-DIMM DDR4-3200

- During the early days of DDR5 (now): (soldered) LPDDR5-7500 vs (socketed) SO-DIMM DDR5-5600

Good luck explaining "ok uh our latest laptop is slower than our last generation but hey you can change the RAM after a few years and it will be faster!" to ordinary users, then.

> The industry does not accept regression

In that caae I want my microphone jack returned please, and laptops with A-sized USB ports again.

that is not regression, that is just brave.

yes, but how much of that was more that the laptop vendors for those models simply chose better RAM chips while the slower binned part got sold as mainstream modules?

What I mean is that your example might just be caused by something else not "we don't know how we can make fast ram on modules"

None. The problem is the traces and the kind of signal that has to travel on the traces, not the chips.

It's not just about upgrading, there's also the ability to replace a bad DIMM. Although upgrading is nice for the secondhand market since most laptop configurations are not the most high-end ones, and they're more likely to become e-waste if you can't make them the best they could've been.

I hope they do. There will soon be so much e-waste from entry-level devices with 8GB RAM that can't be upgraded.

Hopefully CAMM can solve the problem of RAM (replaces SODIMM)

Why do people care about soldered ram? It's so cheap, just get 64GB when you buy it if that is what you want.

Not everyone buys machines new. In ten years that laptop on eBay is stuck with that amount of RAM, limiting its use.

Definitely true. But unlike SSDs (ten years ago you'd get like 256GB, now it's more like 2TB) the ram curve is a lot more flat and it's fairly cheap to buy 32GB+ ram and imo that will future proof you for quite a while.

No, very often extra ram comes bundled only in high end configurations, so you have to buy a much more expensive i7 cpu, or you're charged an extraordinary amount (like +$1000 to go from 16GB ram/512GB ssd to 32GB ram/1TB ssd for a Microsoft Surface), or it's just straight up not available for the model you want.

And what if you want to buy used and upgrade?

Laptops without replaceable ram are disgustingly cynical e-waste and shouldn't be allowed.

Stop buying new laptops then?

CTO RAM price is SO expensive except for SV rich bubble

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