If you’ve ever tried to “future-proof” a purchase by paying for everything you might eventually need up front, you know it can be a sucker’s g

LPCAMM2 Is Finally Here, and It’s a Big Deal

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2024-05-07 15:30:04

If you’ve ever tried to “future-proof” a purchase by paying for everything you might eventually need up front, you know it can be a sucker’s game. The problem? We can’t actually see the future.

But today we got our hands on LPCAMM2 for the first time, and this looks like the future to us. LPCAMM2 is a totally modular, repairable, upgradeable memory standard for laptops, using the latest LPDDR chips for maximum speed and efficiency. So instead of overpaying (or under-speccing) based on guesswork about your future memory needs, you’ll hopefully be able to buy your next laptop and then install more RAM as needed. Imagine that!

We say “hopefully” because the laptop on our teardown table today is the first of its kind, thanks to a collaboration between Micron and Lenovo—and it remains to be seen how many other big laptop makers will adopt LPCAMM2 technology. But judging by the results of our initial hands-on, the writing is on the wall for laptops with soldered-down, non-serviceable memory.

Repairable, upgradeable RAM isn’t exactly a new idea. As anyone who has ever built a PC knows, we’ve had swappable DDR RAM sticks (also known as DIMMs, or Dual In-Line Memory Modules) since basically forever. From old Gateway towers to today’s gaming powerhouses to zillion-dollar industrial servers, upgradeable and replaceable RAM is still very much a thing. And for many years, the same was true of laptops, which used a slightly more compact (“Small-Outline” DIMM, or SO-DIMM) version of those same RAM sticks.