Of all the PC-related things to come out of CES this year, my favorite wasn’t Nvidia’s graphics cards or AMD’s newest Ryzens or Intel’s iterative processor refreshes or any one of the oddball PC concept designs or anything to do with the mad dash to cram generative AI into everything.
No, of all things, the thing that I liked the most was this Crucial-branded memory module spotted by Tom’s Hardware. If it looks a little strange to you, it’s because it uses the Compression Attached Memory Module (CAMM) standard—rather than being a standard stick of RAM that you insert into a slot on your motherboard, it lies flat against the board where metal contacts on the board and the CAMM module can make contact with one another.
CAMM memory has been on my radar for a while, since it first cropped up in a handful of Dell laptops. Mistakenly identified at the time as a proprietary type of RAM that would give Dell an excuse to charge more for it, Dell has been pushing for the standardization of CAMM modules for a couple of years now, and JEDEC (the organization that handles all current computer memory standards) formally finalized the spec just last month.
Something about seeing an actual in-the-wild CAMM module with a Crucial sticker on it, the same kind of sticker you’d see on any old memory module from Amazon or Newegg, made me more excited about the standard’s future. I had a similar feeling when I started digging into USB-C or when I began seeing M.2 modules show up in actual computers (though CAMM would probably be a bit less transformative than either). Here’s a thing that solves some real problems with the current technology, and it has the industry backing to actually become a viable replacement.
From upgradable to soldered (and back again?)
Andrew Cunningham
It used to be easy to save some money on a new PC by buying a version without much RAM and performing an upgrade yourself, using third-party RAM sticks that cost a fraction of what manufacturers would charge. But most laptops no longer afford you the luxury.
Most PC makers and laptop PC buyers made an unspoken bargain in the early- to mid-2010s, around when the MacBook Air and the Ultrabook stopped being special thin-and-light outliers and became the standard template for the mainstream laptop: We would jettison nearly any port or internal component in the interest of making a laptop that was thinner, sleeker, and lighter.
The CD/DVD drive was one of the most immediate casualties, though its demise had already been foreshadowed thanks to cheap USB drives, cloud storage, and streaming music and video services. But as laptops got thinner, it also gradually became harder to find Ethernet and most other non-USB ports (and, eventually, even traditional USB-A ports), space for hard drives (not entirely a bad thing, now that M.2 SSDs are cheap and plentiful), socketed laptop CPUs, and room for other easily replaceable or upgradable components. Early Microsoft Surface tablets were some of the worst examples of this era of computer design—thin sandwiches of glass, metal, and glue that were difficult or impossible to open without totally destroying them.
Another casualty of this shift was memory modules, specifically Dual In-line Memory Modules (DIMMs) that could be plugged into a socket on the motherboard and easily swapped out. Most laptops had a pair of SO-DIMM slots, either stacked on top of each other (adding thickness) or placed side by side (taking up valuable horizontal space that could have been used for more battery).
But eventually these began to go away in favor of soldered-down memory, saving space and making it easier for manufacturers to build the kinds of MacBook Air-alikes that people wanted to buy, but also adding a point of failure to the motherboard and possibly shortening its useful life by setting its maximum memory capacity at the outset.
Andrew Cunningham
Some still laptops still support regular-old SO-DIMMs: many gaming laptops, a fair number of business-centric laptops, and repair-focused machines like the Framework Laptop series among them. But it’s no longer the norm. And the kind of RAM you can get in a SO-DIMM and the kind of RAM that comes soldered to a motherboard has diverged more in recent years, with the mobile-centric LPDDR4 and LPDDR5 standard both offering higher speeds and lower power use than regular-old DDR4 and DDR5.
But repairability and upgradability are gradually coming back into vogue. Repair-minded companies like Framework are driving some of that, but it’s also being driven by right-to-repair legislation and shareholder activism. It’s not happening as quickly as some might like, but repairability and upgradability are becoming an explicit selling point for some PCs and a talking point for some companies, right at the same time as the CAMM standard is slowly gathering steam.
The problems CAMM modules solve, and hurdles that remain
The CAMM standard (technically finalized as CAMM2) tries to offer the best of all possible worlds.
Like SO-DIMMs, CAMM modules are replaceable, though the SO-DIMM slot’s simple retention clips are exchanged for a series of screws. But like soldered chips, they support high-speed low-power LPDDR memory, they lie nearly flat against your laptop’s mainboard, and you don’t need to bother installing them in matched pairs to get dual-channel memory speeds, since a single CAMM module can support both single- and dual-channel speeds (with “future multi-channel setups” also possible, according to JEDEC).
The first hurdle for CAMM will be the same one any new standard faces: getting the buy-in necessary to displace already-prevalent standards. Crucial demoing a new LCAMM2 module is a solid step forward in that department, and Samsung’s commitment to introducing CAMM memory sometime this year is another one. The standard already obviously has buy-in from Dell, which according to IDC data is the world’s third-largest supplier of personal computers, and previous reporting from PCWorld suggests that it has wide industry support as an eventual replacement for SO-DIMM modules.
Dell
The real question might not be whether CAMM replaces SO-DIMM slots in the relatively small number of laptops that still feature upgradable memory, but whether it can take us back to a time when you could assume laptop memory would be upgradable instead of having to search for a laptop that supported it. As a PC manufacturer, why support CAMM in your laptops when you could continue soldering RAM down, locking buyers into paying whatever price you set for upgrades? The prevalence of fast, standardized M.2 SSDs hasn’t kept Apple from sticking with its own proprietary storage in Macs, for example.
Cost will also be a concern, at least for a while. New memory standards generally start out more expensive than what they’re replacing (see: the continuing price difference between DDR4 and DDR5 RAM), and prices only fall after adoption gets wider and memory manufacturers have ramped up to meet demand. A 64GB CAMM module from Dell will currently run you $500 for 32GB or $1,030 for 64GB, which is quite a bit more expensive than buying a pair of SO-DIMMs.
However long it takes CAMM to become mainstream, I’m hopeful that these modules (and a push for greater repairability and upgradability in devices) will eventually make upgradable memory a thing again. They solve the biggest problems with SO-DIMM modules—the amount of space they take up, and their inability to support faster and lower-power types of memory—while also increasing memory capacity. A decade ago, we gave up upgradability to get better, thinner, lighter laptops. Maybe now we can get some of that upgradability back without giving up those advancements.
