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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> Ugh, finally.

FYI, the '2' at the end is because this isn't the first time this has been done. :)

LPCAMM spec has been out for a while. LPCAMM2 is the spec for next-generation parts.

Don't expect either to become mainstream. It's relatively more expensive and space-consuming to build an LPCAMM motherboard versus dropping the RAM chips directly on to the motherboard.

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My recollection of this is that LPCAMM was a proposal from Dell that they put into the JEDEC standardization process, and LPCAMM2 is the resulting standard, named that way to avoid confusion with the non-standard LPCAMM that Dell trialed on a small number of commercial systems.

Almost. The Dell proposal is called CAMM, which was slightly modified during the JEDEC process and standardized as CAMM2, which is the combined with the memory type the same way DIMM was, For example LPDDR5X CAMM2 or DDR5 CAMM2. LPCAMM2 is not a name used in any JEDEC standard or even referred to anywhere on their site, but it seems to be used by both the memory manufacturers and the users because it's less of a mouthful, and they feel there needs to be more to distinguish between LPDDR5 CAMM2 and DDR5 CAMM2 because they are not electrically compatible.

Not to mention putting the RAM directly on a System-in-Package chip like Apple does now. That's going to be unbeatable in terms of space and possibly have an edge when it comes to power consumption too. I wouldn't be surprised if future standards will require on-package RAM.

I kind of wish we could establish a new level in the memory hierarchy. Like, just make a slot where you can add slower more power hungry DDR RAM that acts as a big cache for the NVM storage, or that the OS can offload some of the stuff in main memory if it's not used much. It could be unpopulated in base models, and then you can buy an upgrade to stick in there to get some extra performance later if needed.

This is kind of what Optane was in some incarnations (it's really terrible branding that conflates multiple technologies).

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