This year Dell moved to soldered RAM for its XPS 14 and 16, writes Digital Trends, which "makes it impossible to upgrade, or even repair."
"This was a big change from the past, where the XPS 15 and 17 were both celebrated for their upgradability."
Of course, Dell isn't the first to make the transition. In fact, they're one of the last, which is what makes the decision so much tougher to swallow. Where soldered RAM was previously limited to just MacBooks and ultrabooks, it's now affecting most high-performance laptops for gaming as well. Even the fantastic ROG Zephyrus G14 moved to soldered memory this year.
After two months of research, the article's author acknowledges "there are tangible benefits to companies using soldered RAM, and all the people I spoke to while writing this agree that they outweigh the downsides, but how that applies to the end-user is a bit more complicated."
If there's one thing and one thing only that soldered RAM is indisputably good for, it's saving space. [Haval Othman, a senior director of experience engineering at HP] explained the benefits, saying: "If battery life, mobility, form factor (thin and light), and power efficiency are my priority among other design choices, then my mind immediately goes to soldered RAM; because that's where soldered RAM can be beneficial and power-efficient, which will lead to longer battery life. Plus, it's going to give me more space on the motherboard, so I can design the product thinner and lighter. [...] If we want a thin product, the trade-off is soldering more of the devices onto the board."
This tracks. In a laptop, there's only so much space that can be used for components, and that free space grows smaller by the year to make ultrabooks possible. They're an industrywide trend that was first popularized by Apple, and the rest of the laptop manufacturing world quickly caught on. Each year, laptops are released thinner and lighter, and that means having to squeeze the components together in new, innovative ways... Soldering the memory down onto the motherboard means that it can be attached almost anywhere within the laptop instead of being slotted into a specific part of it. It effectively makes the laptop thinner by cutting back on the space that the RAM module takes up. The space saved by soldering memory can be used for other things, such as a bigger battery....
All three companies that I spoke to stress the form factor much more than any tangible cost benefits... Stuart Gill, director of global media relations, campaigns, and corporate content [said] "Both soldered and socketed RAM designs are now quite mature. As a result, we see no impact on the manufacturing process and, therefore, the cost to the consumer."
SO-DIMM chips also have "relatively limited bandwidth," according to HP's Othman, "while when you solder the memory chips onto the board, you can build it for a much wider bandwidth."
But the article ends by looking to the future. "The good news is that SO-DIMM memory might eventually be replaced by the CAMM2 standard."
Recently approved by JEDEC, CAMM2 is said to be significantly thinner, and it'll be available both in soldered and non-soldered variants. Using CAMM2 will allow laptops to stack up to 128GB of RAM, and the frequencies are said to be going up, too. CAMM2 can also activate dual-channel memory with just a single module.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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