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LPCAMM2 is a modular, repairable, upgradeable memory standard for laptops

ifixit.com

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Re: LPCAMM2 is a modular, repairable, upgradeable memory standard for laptops

#31

Post by farmdve »

zamadatix wrote: post #20
farmdve wrote: post #9

Remember that Haswell laptops were the last to feature socketed CPUs. RAM is nice to upgrade, for sure. As well as an SSD, but CPUs are still a must. I would even suggest upgradeable GPUs but I don't think the money is there for the manufacturers. Why allow you to upgrade when you can buy a whole new laptop?

I'm not sure I really get much value out of a socketed CPU, particularly in a laptop, vs something like a swappable MB+CPU combo where the CPU is not socketed. RAM/Storage are great upgrades because 5 years from now you can pop in 4x the capacity at a bargain since it's the "old slow type". CPUs don't really get the same growth in a socket's lifespan.

As I said to the comment above, it makes perfect sense. In 2014 we purchased a dual core Haswell. Almost a decade later I revive the laptop by installing more ram, an SSD and the best possible quad core CPU for that laptop. The gain in processing power were massive and made the laptop useable again.

Re: LPCAMM2 is a modular, repairable, upgradeable memory standard for laptops

#32

Post by jcotton42 »

oneplane wrote: post #28

On the other hand, with a reflow station everything becomes modular and repairable. I do hope that a more widespread usage of compressed attachment gives us some development in that area where projects that were promising modular devices failed (remember those 'modular' phone concepts? available physical interconnects were one of the failures...). Sockets for BGAs have existed for a while, but were not really end-use…

> On the other hand, with a reflow station everything becomes modular and repairable.

Not for the average person.

Re: LPCAMM2 is a modular, repairable, upgradeable memory standard for laptops

#33

Post by nwah1 »

farmdve wrote: post #18
leduyquang753 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Framework laptop 16 features replaceable GPU.

These are very obscure, or perhaps I mean to say niche laptop manufacturers. We need this standard for all of them, HP, Lenovo, Acer etc.

Framework open sources most of their schematics, if I understand correctly. So it should be possible for others to use the same standard, if they wanted to. (they don't want to)

Re: LPCAMM2 is a modular, repairable, upgradeable memory standard for laptops

#34

Post by chpatrick »

cjk2 wrote: post #3
mmastrac wrote: post #2

Ugh, finally. And it's not just a repurposed desktop memory standard either! The overall space requirements look to be similar to the BGA that you'd normally solder on (perhaps 2-3x as thick?). I'm sure they can reduce that overhead going forward. I love the disclosure at the bottom: Full Disclosure: iFixit has prior business relationships with both Micron and Lenovo, and we are hopelessly biased in favor of repairab…

Yeah they even gloss over Lenovo's crappy soldered on the motherboard USB-C connectors which is always the weak point on modern thinkpads. Well that and Digital River (Lenovo's distributor) carries absolutely no spare parts at all for any Lenovos in Europe, and if they do they only rarely turn up, so you can't replace any replaceable bits because you can't get any.

Have you tried https://www.lenovopartsales.com/LenovoEsales ?

Re: LPCAMM2 is a modular, repairable, upgradeable memory standard for laptops

#35

Post by zamadatix »

farmdve wrote: post #31
zamadatix wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I really get much value out of a socketed CPU, particularly in a laptop, vs something like a swappable MB+CPU combo where the CPU is not socketed. RAM/Storage are great upgrades because 5 years from now you can pop in 4x the capacity at a bargain since it's the "old slow type". CPUs don't really get the same growth in a socket's lifespan.

As I said to the comment above, it makes perfect sense. In 2014 we purchased a dual core Haswell. Almost a decade later I revive the laptop by installing more ram, an SSD and the best possible quad core CPU for that laptop. The gain in processing power were massive and made the laptop useable again.

I'm sure it's all subjective (e.g. I'm sure someone here even considers the original dual core Haswell more than fine without upgrade in 2024) but going from a dual core Haswell to a quad core Haswell (or even a generation or two beyond, had it been supported) as an upgrade a decade after the fact just doesn't seem worth it to me.

The RAM/SSD sure - a 2 TB consumer SSD wasn't even a possible thing to buy until a year after that laptop would have come out and you can get that for <$100 new now. It won't be the highest performing modern drive but it'll still max out the bus and be many times larger than the original drive. Swap equipment 3 years from now and that's also still a great usable drive rather than a museum piece. Upgrading to a CPU that you could have gotten around the time the laptop came out? Sure, it has twice as many cores... but it still has pretty bad multi core performance and a god awful perf/wattage ratio to be investing new money on a laptop for. It's also a bit of a dead end, in 3 years you'll now have 2 CPUs so ancient you can't really do much with them.

Re: LPCAMM2 is a modular, repairable, upgradeable memory standard for laptops

#36

Post by colinng »

cjk2 wrote: post #5
baby_souffle wrote: post #4

This is fantastic news. Hopefully the cost to manufacturers is only marginal and they find a suitable replacement for their current "each tier in RAM comes with a 5-20% price bump" pricing scheme. Too bad apple is almost guaranteed to not adopt the standard. I miss being able to upgrade the ram in macbooks.

Given enough pressure ...

They will maliciously comply. They might even have 4 sockets for the 512-bit wide systems. But then they’ll keep the SSD devices soldered - just like they’ve done for a long time. Or cover them with epoxy, or rig it with explosives. That’ll show you for trying to upgrade! How dare you ruin the beautiful fat profit margin that our MBAs worked so hard to design in?!?

Re: LPCAMM2 is a modular, repairable, upgradeable memory standard for laptops

#38

Post by colinng »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #23

Meanwhile Apple bakes the RAM,CPU,GPU all into the same "chip". Good luck with that.

Don’t forget - they solder in the flash too even though there is no technical reason to do so.

Unless “impossibly far profit margin” is a technical requirement.

Re: LPCAMM2 is a modular, repairable, upgradeable memory standard for laptops

#39

Post by magicalhippo »

dvh wrote: post #6

What's wrong with DIMM?

The physical size of the socket and having the connections on the edge means you're forced to have much longer traces. Longer traces means slower signalling and more power loss due to higher resistance and parasitics.

This[1] Anandtech article from last year has a better look at how the LPCAMM module works. Especially note how the connectors are now densely packed directly under the memory chips, significantly reducing the trace length needed. Not just on the memory module itself but also on the motherboard due to the more compact memory module. It also allows for more pins to be connected, thus higher bandwidth (more bits per cycle).

[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21069/modular-lpddr-becomes-a...

Re: LPCAMM2 is a modular, repairable, upgradeable memory standard for laptops

#40

Post by Aurornis »

baby_souffle wrote: post #4

This is fantastic news. Hopefully the cost to manufacturers is only marginal and they find a suitable replacement for their current "each tier in RAM comes with a 5-20% price bump" pricing scheme. Too bad apple is almost guaranteed to not adopt the standard. I miss being able to upgrade the ram in macbooks.

> Too bad apple is almost guaranteed to not adopt the standard.

Apple would require multiple LPCAMM2 modules to provide the bus width necessary for their chips. Up to 4 x LPCAMM2 modules depending on the processor.

The size of each LPCAMM2 module is almost as big as the entire size of an Apple CPU combined with the unified RAM chips, so putting 2-4 LPCAMM2 modules on the board is completely infeasible without significantly increasing the size of the laptop.

Remember, the Apple architecture is a combined CPU/GPU architecture and has memory bandwidth to match. It's closer to your GPU than the CPU in your non-Mac machine. Asking to have upgradeable RAM on Apple laptops is akin to almost like asking for upgradeable RAM on your GPU (which would not be cheap or easy)

For every 1 person who thinks they'd want a bigger MacBook Pro if it enabled memory upgrades, there are many, many more people who would gladly take the smaller size of the integrated solution we have today.

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