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Dell Will Have Custom DDR5 Memory Module for its Upcoming Laptops

TheLostSwede

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A leak with details about upcoming Dell notebooks has revealed that Dell's upcoming notebooks with DDR5 memory will feature a custom memory module that Dell calls CAMM, or Compression Attached Memory Module. The CAMM can support up to 128 GB RAM according to the leak and initial modules will support memory speeds of 4800 MHz. It's unclear if notebooks with CAMM support will have soldered down memory as well, but what is clear is that Dell is not looking at using traditional SO-DIMM type modules.

The first notebooks from Dell to feature the new module appears to be the Precision 7-series, which will also feature an Intel 55 W Alder Lake-HX series CPU, a choice of an NVIDIA RTX A5000 GPU or Intel Arc DG2 based graphics with a 90 W TDP, as well as up to 12 TB of NVMe storage over PCIe 4.0. Apparently Dell has developed what it calls DGFF or Dell Graphics Form Factor for these laptops, which suggests that they'll feature some kind of modular graphics solution. Considering that at least some models in Precision 7-series will sport 16-inch displays, there should be plenty of space for a GPU module, although it'll be interesting to see exactly what Dell is bringing to the table that's new here.



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That means users can't freely source for after market RAM anymore.
 
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Honestly, I would welcome the development of a denser, smaller connector/more compact standard for memory. The SODIMM form factor is great in its simplicity, but it's unsuitable for a lot of laptop designs simply due to the thickness of the connector. An integrated dual channel (or more precisely 2*2*32-bit for DDR5) module like this would probably be smart, and larger systems could likely go 2DPC with two modules for higher capacity. Still, it would obviously need to be an open standard. All this will achieve for now is in-house, first party upgrades at likely exorbitant prices.
 
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as well as up to 12 GB of NVMe storage over PCIe 4.0

These memory modules must be gigantic seeing that you can fit 128gb of them into a slim chassis yet only have 12gb of storage.
 
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Welp :\

It's better than soldered RAM I guess, but only barely. What's the benefit to end users? Oh right, of course....

One thing that bugged me immensely with laptops from the last 2-3 years - Dell being as guilty as the others - is that even if money was no object, a thin&light laptop rarely came with more than 16GB RAM. That's frankly ridiculous since you can build a 64GB machine with just two DIMMS for no additional cost/GB. At the very least, if Dell could stop selling i7 and dGPU laptops with only 8GB that would be nice. What's the point of a fast CPU that you can't do anything with, anyhow?!
 
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Still better than having it completely soldered, I guess. It seems like there's someone behind the "trend" of soldered memory in non-gaming laptops.

That wallpaper though...
Screenshot_20220418-162311_Wallpaper and style.png
 
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That means users can't freely source for after market RAM anymore.
Who really does that anymore? The people who really would buy aftermarket RAM-modules to upgrade their laptop are probably less than 1% of users. It makes absolutely no sense to keep up with old tech such as upgradable RAM-modules and because of that to design big fat laptops. There is so much space to be saved with soldered RAM and even soldered SSDs. Maybe there's a better case to be made with SSDs but definitely not with RAM.

Even gaming laptops don't need more than 16-GB of RAM, 32-GB in rare cases.

IMO upgradability will become a thing of the past.
 
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Who really does that anymore? The people who really would buy aftermarket RAM-modules to upgrade their laptop are probably less than 1% of users.
Initially I don't really believe this to be the case..... until I looked at my cousins laptop during GPU apocalypse, she want a more playable experience for the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, she told me her laptop have i5 8300H and GTX 1050 4GB, I reckon everything should be fine until I actually turn the machine on and saw 4GB of ram.

Yes, ram, soldered too, shame on you Lenovo! I have no idea how can she survive on 4GB of ram for so long, its actually kind of impressive.
 
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Initially I don't really believe this to be the case..... until I looked at my cousins laptop during GPU apocalypse, she want a more playable experience for the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, she told me her laptop have i5 8300H and GTX 1050 4GB, I reckon everything should be fine until I actually turn the machine on and saw 4GB of ram.

Yes, ram, soldered too, shame on you Lenovo! I have no idea how can she survive on 4GB of ram for so long, its actually kind of impressive.
4 Gig is not much, but of course it runs.
It even runs fluid.

Windows has gotten better RAM management back with Windows 8.
Well and Linux will run it even better. Of course, that is, until you compile or render complex things.

As to the topic:

The whole industry will shift towards more proprietary formfactors and technology.
On one hand that is good, because then you can fit more power in a smaller,better looking formfactor, with better energy efficiency.
On the other hand tough, you won't be able to upgrade your stuff, wich could (most people do not upgrade) mean more waste.

Also note that repairability does get affected by this, but as long as they do not artificial limit replacing parts in firmware or software (crackable tough,but makes it harder without any positives for the consumer) i still don't hate it.
I'm a strong believer in right to repair. But on the same note you have to admit that most people simply do not care about that. They use it until it is out of warranty and if it dies, then buy a new one.
 
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Welp :\

It's better than soldered RAM I guess, but only barely. What's the benefit to end users? Oh right, of course....

One thing that bugged me immensely with laptops from the last 2-3 years - Dell being as guilty as the others - is that even if money was no object, a thin&light laptop rarely came with more than 16GB RAM. That's frankly ridiculous since you can build a 64GB machine with just two DIMMS for no additional cost/GB. At the very least, if Dell could stop selling i7 and dGPU laptops with only 8GB that would be nice. What's the point of a fast CPU that you can't do anything with, anyhow?!

What could you possibly need more then 16GB of ram on a thin an light / ultrabook for? These machines are designed for mobility and battery life, not power hungry performance applications. Any software that can make use of 64GB of ram will also want a powerful CPU and or dGPU like for example 3D Studio MAX. Maybe compiling code?

In any case, dell kind of shot themselves in the foot with this move. Custom dimms means you can only buy them from dell, making for poor or lack of availability in some parts of the world as well as arbitrary pricing. As if I needed another reason to stay away from dell notebooks...
 
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Initially I don't really believe this to be the case..... until I looked at my cousins laptop during GPU apocalypse, she want a more playable experience for the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, she told me her laptop have i5 8300H and GTX 1050 4GB, I reckon everything should be fine until I actually turn the machine on and saw 4GB of ram.

Yes, ram, soldered too, shame on you Lenovo! I have no idea how can she survive on 4GB of ram for so long, its actually kind of impressive.
I think that laptop was made just for light internet browsing and office work. Probably it is very thin machine. As far as I know video game assets are held in the GPU and this is where RAM is important I don't know how many games hold their assets in the laptop regular RAM.. even if it was upgradable probably it would still have been slow.
 

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Still better than having it completely soldered, I guess. It seems like there's someone behind the "trend" of soldered memory in non-gaming laptops.

That wallpaper though...
Not better at all. The modules are most likely proprietary. They will be either unavailable at retail or will cost an arm and a leg because of low volume.

Dell is taking a page out of Apple's book: if you want more RAM we'll be happy to install it for you for the low, low price of $50 (price of RAM not included).

It's par for the course, I guess. The Dell I liked that allowed you to actually configure a laptop is long gone now.
 

TheLostSwede

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These memory modules must be gigantic seeing that you can fit 128gb of them into a slim chassis yet only have 12gb of storage.
Fixed.

Who really does that anymore? The people who really would buy aftermarket RAM-modules to upgrade their laptop are probably less than 1% of users. It makes absolutely no sense to keep up with old tech such as upgradable RAM-modules and because of that to design big fat laptops. There is so much space to be saved with soldered RAM and even soldered SSDs. Maybe there's a better case to be made with SSDs but definitely not with RAM.

Even gaming laptops don't need more than 16-GB of RAM, 32-GB in rare cases.

IMO upgradability will become a thing of the past.
Most likely a lot more people than you think.
I upgraded someone's Lenovo a couple of years ago, as it was only sold with 4 GB of RAM, so I plugged in another 4 GB, as well as swapped out the mechanical drive for an SSD.

I would also guess a fair amount of business notebooks are being upgraded over the lifespan, if possible, as it's a cheap way to get more life out of an older notebook.
 
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Honestly, I would welcome the development of a denser, smaller connector/more compact standard for memory. The SODIMM form factor is great in its simplicity, but it's unsuitable for a lot of laptop designs simply due to the thickness of the connector. An integrated dual channel (or more precisely 2*2*32-bit for DDR5) module like this would probably be smart, and larger systems could likely go 2DPC with two modules for higher capacity. Still, it would obviously need to be an open standard. All this will achieve for now is in-house, first party upgrades at likely exorbitant prices.

This is not a thin and light though, the precision laptops like this are big and heavy chonkers (I have one and I hate it :D )

Welp :\

It's better than soldered RAM I guess, but only barely. What's the benefit to end users? Oh right, of course....

One thing that bugged me immensely with laptops from the last 2-3 years - Dell being as guilty as the others - is that even if money was no object, a thin&light laptop rarely came with more than 16GB RAM. That's frankly ridiculous since you can build a 64GB machine with just two DIMMS for no additional cost/GB. At the very least, if Dell could stop selling i7 and dGPU laptops with only 8GB that would be nice. What's the point of a fast CPU that you can't do anything with, anyhow?!

The reason is very likely the density of sodimm vs sodering the chips on the board. You can get 32gb sodimm sticks (double sided), while designing a board with ram on both sides would be harder and might lead to problems for configurations less populated (entry level with less memory). It would almost be funny if it wasn't so sad: pursuing easier integration they made it more much more difficult to have different configurations.

Some SKUs can use a SO-DIMMs/CAMM interposer to enable SO-DIMM.


Why even bother then!? This will go the same way as the mxm modules, lay around for a couple years and then die.

Who really does that anymore? The people who really would buy aftermarket RAM-modules to upgrade their laptop are probably less than 1% of users. It makes absolutely no sense to keep up with old tech such as upgradable RAM-modules and because of that to design big fat laptops. There is so much space to be saved with soldered RAM and even soldered SSDs. Maybe there's a better case to be made with SSDs but definitely not with RAM.

Even gaming laptops don't need more than 16-GB of RAM, 32-GB in rare cases.

IMO upgradability will become a thing of the past.

Well, you're wrong. Thin and lights or gaming laptops are only a part of the market, most home users may not bother too much about it (I disagree, storage upgrade are somewhat common, gotta store those irrelevant family fotos and etc) but the large and vast business market would not buy anything like that. Imagine a fleet of laptops and half an entire office (the target market for laptops like this dell precision) being down waiting on board replacements because of a simple ram module or ssd that the local tech could do in minutes - not going to happen.
 
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What could you possibly need more then 16GB of ram on a thin an light / ultrabook for? These machines are designed for mobility and battery life, not power hungry performance applications. Any software that can make use of 64GB of ram will also want a powerful CPU and or dGPU like for example 3D Studio MAX. Maybe compiling code?

In any case, dell kind of shot themselves in the foot with this move. Custom dimms means you can only buy them from dell, making for poor or lack of availability in some parts of the world as well as arbitrary pricing. As if I needed another reason to stay away from dell notebooks...
How can you be so shortsighted? People don't use laptops unplugged all the time; I travel a lot and still spend 80-90% of the time plugged in with mine knowing that when on batteries I can't do anything intensive without limiting myself to a couple of hours battery life.

Thin and lights aren't exclusively for use on the go, they're usually someone's main computer and they need to be able to do everything.
 

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Who really does that anymore? The people who really would buy aftermarket RAM-modules to upgrade their laptop are probably less than 1% of users.

People like me - Because quite often it can work out cheaper to buy the base level spec of a laptop and add your own ram at a lower price.

At the same time Dell also make Mini PCs which can run on SODIMMs depending on the model.

Id be down for getting something like an Intel NUC just to use for basic stuff like web surfing and media streaming when i dont need all the horsepower of a 1080Ti and 8600k.
 
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Honestly, I would welcome the development of a denser, smaller connector/more compact standard for memory. The SODIMM form factor is great in its simplicity, but it's unsuitable for a lot of laptop designs simply due to the thickness of the connector. An integrated dual channel (or more precisely 2*2*32-bit for DDR5) module like this would probably be smart, and larger systems could likely go 2DPC with two modules for higher capacity. Still, it would obviously need to be an open standard. All this will achieve for now is in-house, first party upgrades at likely exorbitant prices.
can't you just reinvent the connector tho
 
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Who really does that anymore? The people who really would buy aftermarket RAM-modules to upgrade their laptop are probably less than 1% of users. It makes absolutely no sense to keep up with old tech such as upgradable RAM-modules and because of that to design big fat laptops. There is so much space to be saved with soldered RAM and even soldered SSDs. Maybe there's a better case to be made with SSDs but definitely not with RAM.

Even gaming laptops don't need more than 16-GB of RAM, 32-GB in rare cases.

IMO upgradability will become a thing of the past.
Anyone who keeps their laptops more then a few years. It's become a daily occurance lately with people bringing me 5 year old laptops that have 8GB of soldreed RAM who are finding that now, with newer versions of windows and chrome, that 8Gb just doesnt cut it,a nd I have to tell them they are SOL.

Throwaway culture is a cancer upon both our society and our enviroment. My current laptop, for instance, in .7 inches thick and it supports SODIMMS. you dont need to make things "fat" (and seriously, if a laptops being 5 pounds instead of 4 is a major issue then muild some arm muscle FFS) you just have to have an intelligent design from the get go.
 
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This is not a thin and light though, the precision laptops like this are big and heavy chonkers (I have one and I hate it :D )



The reason is very likely the density of sodimm vs sodering the chips on the board. You can get 32gb sodimm sticks (double sided), while designing a board with ram on both sides would be harder and might lead to problems for configurations less populated (entry level with less memory). It would almost be funny if it wasn't so sad: pursuing easier integration they made it more much more difficult to have different configurations.



Why even bother then!? This will go the same way as the mxm modules, lay around for a couple years and then die.



Well, you're wrong. Thin and lights or gaming laptops are only a part of the market, most home users may not bother too much about it (I disagree, storage upgrade are somewhat common, gotta store those irrelevant family fotos and etc) but the large and vast business market would not buy anything like that. Imagine a fleet of laptops and half an entire office (the target market for laptops like this dell precision) being down waiting on board replacements because of a simple ram module or ssd that the local tech could do in minutes - not going to happen.
An entire fleet of laptops having RAM fails at the same time is like NOT POSSIBLE. When like ever RAM really fails that much that it requires upgradable DIMM slots.. please be a bit more realistic in your arguments. Maybe a single RAM unit will fail in 50,000 units so I can't really see the point you're making. Also big corporations never bother with upgrading small parts. They just change everything in bulk. You're also wrong about storage of photos and videos. When you backup your videos and photos you do that on a separate external storage media, even like a spinning drive, you don't even really need an SSD for long term storage that you access on some occasions. You never backup photos or media on your internal OS drive be it a laptop or a PC.. that is a super amateur move. You do realize that the idea of backups is to make copies on separate drives?
 
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Dell seems to spend a bunch of money engineering custom form factors for parts, but they end up in products that aren't any better than competitors that use standard stuff. Why bother?
 
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Anyone who keeps their laptops more then a few years. It's become a daily occurance lately with people bringing me 5 year old laptops that have 8GB of soldreed RAM who are finding that now, with newer versions of windows and chrome, that 8Gb just doesnt cut it,a nd I have to tell them they are SOL.

Throwaway culture is a cancer upon both our society and our enviroment. My current laptop, for instance, in .7 inches thick and it supports SODIMMS. you dont need to make things "fat" (and seriously, if a laptops being 5 pounds instead of 4 is a major issue then muild some arm muscle FFS) you just have to have an intelligent design from the get go.
I agree. The Throwaway culture was cultivated by manufacturers as a way to capitalize on peoples wallets. Proprietary anything in laptops means it will be outdated and basically useless(well, almost) in a shorter period of time. Yeah upgrades will mean you will be forced into buying new.

Another way to seeing this is another way to avoid the Right to Repair, Warranties, and RMA costs by encouraging the throwaway culture. Dell/HP/Lenovo have been doing this to home PCs as well, allowing very limited upgrades. Its just a matter of time before those home PCs will also have these custom sized modules.
 
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Software Windows 10 Pro
can't you just reinvent the connector tho
That seems to be the main focus with this - rather than a two-sided connector with spring-loaded contacts on both sides of the PCB it uses some form of flat pin array or similar (either like the flat connectors used in smartphones or something more like on those HPC/server OAM accelerators? Fitting 2x288(ish) pins onto a single connector isn't trivial, which is likely why they've gone for a screw-in "compression mount" like this. It can likely cut several mm Z-height off the full assembly.
 
Joined
Aug 2, 2012
Messages
1,986 (0.44/day)
Location
Netherlands
System Name TheDeeGee's PC
Processor Intel Core i7-11700
Motherboard ASRock Z590 Steel Legend
Cooling Noctua NH-D15S
Memory Crucial Ballistix 3200/C16 32GB
Video Card(s) Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti 12GB
Storage Crucial P5 Plus 2TB / Crucial P3 Plus 2TB / Crucial P3 Plus 4TB
Display(s) EIZO CX240
Case Lian-Li O11 Dynamic Evo XL / Noctua NF-A12x25 fans
Audio Device(s) Creative Sound Blaster ZXR / AKG K601 Headphones
Power Supply Seasonic PRIME Fanless TX-700
Mouse Logitech G500S
Keyboard Keychron Q6
Software Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit
Benchmark Scores None, as long as my games runs smooth.
Ah yes Dell, the world leading e-waste company.
 
Joined
Feb 20, 2019
Messages
8,278 (3.93/day)
System Name Bragging Rights
Processor Atom Z3735F 1.33GHz
Motherboard It has no markings but it's green
Cooling No, it's a 2.2W processor
Memory 2GB DDR3L-1333
Video Card(s) Gen7 Intel HD (4EU @ 311MHz)
Storage 32GB eMMC and 128GB Sandisk Extreme U3
Display(s) 10" IPS 1280x800 60Hz
Case Veddha T2
Audio Device(s) Apparently, yes
Power Supply Samsung 18W 5V fast-charger
Mouse MX Anywhere 2
Keyboard Logitech MX Keys (not Cherry MX at all)
VR HMD Samsung Oddyssey, not that I'd plug it into this though....
Software W10 21H1, barely
Benchmark Scores I once clocked a Celeron-300A to 564MHz on an Abit BE6 and it scored over 9000.
Who really does that anymore? The people who really would buy aftermarket RAM-modules to upgrade their laptop are probably less than 1% of users. It makes absolutely no sense to keep up with old tech such as upgradable RAM-modules and because of that to design big fat laptops. There is so much space to be saved with soldered RAM and even soldered SSDs. Maybe there's a better case to be made with SSDs but definitely not with RAM.

Even gaming laptops don't need more than 16-GB of RAM, 32-GB in rare cases.

IMO upgradability will become a thing of the past.
It's more common than you think, because manufacturers do stupid shit like only offering an i3 with 4GB RAM.
Want 8GB RAM? Sure, but you also have to spend up for the i5 model.
16GB RAM? That's only available on the i7 models.

So we're forced to buy an i7 at twice the price of an i3 just to get more RAM, even if all the laptop is ever going to do is run 800 chrome tabs and a frickin' Celeron would be just fine...
People buy cheap laptops with insufficient RAM in it and add it themselves all the time. They wouldn't, if they didn't have to, but the reason there are so many guides for all the bajillions of laptops on the market is because people do watch those videos enough for the vloggers to keep making them.
 
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