CAMM to Usurp SO-DIMM Laptop Memory Form Factor Says JEDEC Member

Goodbye SO-DIMMs. After a quarter-century of use in laptops, all-in-ones, and other compact designs, the end of the road for SO-DIMMs seems to be in sight. Tom Schnell, JEDEC board member and Senior Distinguished Engineer at Dell, said: PC World We expect the new “CAMM Common Spec” to be the next RAM standard for laptops. The v0.5 specification has already been approved by about 20 companies in the task group, and JEDEC is expected to finalize the v1.0 specification later this year, so it seems there has already been a lot of progress in the background.

If CAMM sounds familiar, it might be because last year Dell’s Precision 7670 laptop came out with DDR5 memory in one of those packages. As I said at the time, CAMM can make laptops slimmer and weigh a few grams less. It could also help the laptop increase his memory loadout as Dell touts his Precision 7670 with his CAMM option of up to 128 GB.

New information from a chat with PC World editors Gordon Ung and Tom Schnell helps weigh some of CAMM’s strengths and weaknesses, and in some respects from Dell’s pre-JEDEC-approved specifications. It shows progress. Clearly, as well as increasing density (more RAM capacity in a smaller space), CAMM lends itself well to “scaling to ever-higher clock speeds.” Specifically, new information shows that the DDR5-6400 “brick wall” of SO-DIMMs is shrugged off by his CAMM.

Once CAMM reaches devices, there are several technological advances that will help drive its adoption. It is thought that there is. Another attractive variation is to add his LPDDR(6) memory to your laptop. Traditionally, LPDDR memory is soldered down, so the new spring contact fitting module means significantly improved upgradeability for the thinnest and lightest devices that tend to use LPDDR memory.