The Curse of Soldered RAM

https://blog.hardill.me.uk/2026/10/24/the-curse-of-soldered-ram/

54•gsky•1d ago

Comments

potamic•1d ago

LPCAMM2 sockets were supposed to provide all the benefits of soldering while still being a socket. Anyone know the state of adoption?

rasz•1d ago

the fact no component supplier, not even alibaba sells LPCAMM2 sockets tells you everything you need to know. The only prices I can find are in $30 range per socket

ACCount39•34m ago

Honestly, reasonable.

I've been eyeing LPCAMM2 interposers for non-RAM uses - as an off the shelf connector for stacked PCB designs. The conclusion was that it wasn't produced or used at sufficient scale for it to work.

dist-epoch•18m ago

All of the new NVIDIA data center GPUs use SOCAMM2, quite similar to LPCAMM2.

https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/business/tech-science/20260420/...

eqvinox•23m ago

Connectors are expensive, high-speed ones particularly. $30 is fine, though it makes a giant difference at what quantity that is. Did you look at a single one or 1k?

noman-land•14h ago

The new Framework 13 Pro laptop ships with LPCAMM2.

https://frame.work/blog/framework-laptop-13-pro-deep-dive-lp...

nicman23•1h ago

yeah but there is very little interest in that model compared to ai max line

snvzz•15m ago

But no ECC support.

mrheosuper•35m ago

Lenovo uses it on their latest thinkpad t14.

bugake•7m ago

You can't buy a single LPCAMM2 RAM module on Amazon. eBay has some.

RetroTechie•1d ago

Bash me all you want, but after CPU, GPU, memory controller & a host of other things integrated in modern System-on-Chips (SoC), I've long held the belief that next logical step would be to integrate RAM.

Optimal: piecemeal. As in: X sockets on a board, each socket takes a chip that adds CPU core(s), GPU cores, and some amount of main RAM. More chips, more powerful computer.

Keyword: socket. Read: replaceable. Bad chip out, good chip in. Slow chip out, faster chip in. Soldered onto board = reliable, but a defect could junk the whole machine.

musicale•1d ago

> Bash me all you want, but after CPU, GPU, memory controller & a host of other things integrated in modern System-on-Chips (SoC), I've long held the belief that next logical step would be to integrate RAM

Haven't Apple (A-series, M-series) and others been copackaging memory for a while? (SiP or MCM?)

jacquesm•1h ago

Those aren't socketed though, are they?

bartvbl•21m ago

Manufacturing processes for RAM and processor cores are not one and the same and use different tradeoffs. It's the main problem in-memory processing is running into, which is akin to what you're describing here. The die space required for the same level of performance makes the idea of on-die RAM intractible. The best they're able to do with RAM optimised manufacturing processes are tiny RISC-V cores that lack most of the feature sets. What apple does with moving the RAM chips on to the package really is the only viable option.

vbezhenar•

musicale•1d ago

> I then had to manually transcribe this, which [w]as “fun”.

Can't you select and copy the text in the photo (on most smartphones and PCs at least)?

pseudohadamard•1d ago

Since the OP mentions Lenovo, look at their other product lines for ones that still have socketed RAM. I'm currently running an E16 with 40GB RAM, 8GB soldered, 32GB socketed. And aside from that it leaves my previous X1 for dead in terms of performance. Lenovo's replacing the carbon fiber case, the whole reason the X1 line is called "Carbon", with crappy black plastic was the last straw.

nicman23•1h ago

i had to move a very very small resistor in the correct place to make a laptop disregard the soldered ram and only use the sodimm

Neil44•1h ago

We used to buy Dells with minimum RAM and add quality third party RAM for way less than Dell wanted for it. They also use ram quantity to leverage other specs we're not bothered about. Of course they are moving to soldered.

bugake•11m ago

Prebuilt branded PCs have always had inferior quality, compatibility, and expandability problems, all with overpricing.

ethin•57m ago

Am I the only one who wonders if there is a way to get the kind of performance we want out of non-soldered components/SOC designs? Like from what I've heard, it's a "physics says no" problem, but I'm not sure if that's actually true (not being an expert in this technology) or if it's just the excuse many companies use to justify soldering everything to make serviceability impossible. And it would be really neat if this is actually being looked into by labs right now (possibly with AI's help), since areas like that are where I think (non) LLM AIs might be very useful. Same thing for medicine, materials, etc.

bigstrat2003•33m ago

While it's true that you can get better performance out of soldered memory than a socket, that's also not why vendors use it. Desktop computers, with their very much not soldered memory, get great performance after all. The laptop vendors solder the memory because it lets them make more money off selling units with more memory soldered in. That's all.

Animats•15m ago

It's partly a thickness problem. Sockets add height to boards.

Besides, since RAM isn't getting cheaper for a while, this isn't a big issue now.

askvictor•10m ago

Are any customers asking for a laptop that is 1 or 2mm thinner?

dist-epoch•11m ago

That's not all.

"Smartphone makers glue them because it's cheaper and they can make more money ..." No. It's what the consumers want. Thinner phones, water resistant phones, and thinner laptops.

LeoPanthera•54m ago

I'm stunned that "mapping out" blocks of bad RAM is a thing you can do. It reminds me of the old days when hard disks had to be "low-level formatted" first (ask your parents, kids) and it would ask you for a list of bad sectors to map out. Sometimes hard disks would even come with a list of known bad ones printed on the top.

bobowzki•49m ago

Well that was good to learn!

swiftcoder•41m ago

It it possible to desolder and replace the offending RAM if one were sufficiently motivated? I've seen folks doing that to soldered SSDs in MacBooks

ACCount39•29m ago

It is - anything short of HBM can be replaced that way.

The issue, of course, is just how much time, effort and skill is required to do it.

It might become a viable commercial process outside third world countries if RAM prices spike even more - or if someone finds a way to teach an off the shelf $1000 robot arm advanced autonomous microsoldering.

Then there's the problem of forcing the device itself to recognize the new RAM. It's a device-specific trick. RAM sticks have a little tag chip that tells a PC "how much RAM this stick has", but RAM chips themselves don't - so the device has to infer its RAM capacity from elsewhere. Like strap resistors on the board. Which you have to find and adjust for the new RAM capacity. That, or fix the RAM values in firmware, which is also device-specific.

skissane•18m ago

> RAM sticks have a little tag chip that tells a PC "how much RAM this stick has", but RAM chips themselves don't - so the device has to infer its RAM capacity from elsewhere

I'm surprised that in 2026 this is still true.

You could easily fit a little microcontroller on the die of each RAM chip which reports its make/model/manufacturing date, capacity and capabilities, can be triggered to run self-tests, etc. If they aren't doing that yet, I'm surprised that they aren't.

misnome•8m ago

Why bother with the expense if you are permanently soldering it in anyway?

eqvinox

bozdemir•18m ago

Like the exact case with phone batteries that are not easily changable by the owner, soldered rams are evil...

bugake•17m ago

The race to make laptops thinner is pointless. I wish I could buy a thicker laptop that is more robust, repairable, expandable, and has better cooling, with the extra space filled with batteries.

groomlake•3m ago

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The Curse of Soldered RAM

Comments

Show HN: TitleArt – Make text like it's 1997

PaperPilot – Zero-Cloud, Pure-Rust PDF Engine with WASM and MCP

Dolly Parton's Imagination Library

Show HN: A Truly Modular Keyboard

Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office

Growing Trees

The Curse of Soldered RAM

The result of the C++26 DIS ballot

Overgrown, when plants invade your abandoned tabs

Attention Is Not What You Need (2025)

IBM CEO says open weight models are now good and cheap on-prem

Why I Am a Programmer

Microsoft Decision-1: 9B Qwen Model Launch Explained

F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS

Steal My Bitcoin CTF PoC

Iron Age salt-mining complex found beneath Hallstatt in Austria

The State of Context Engineering

Cognitive Mercantilism: AI panic resembles fears of early capitalism

What goes into making an animated film?

Show HN: ADRs for AI – Deliberation records for human–AI work, versioned in Git

Amazon’s “digital pacifier” for toddlers

We should be more ambitious with the software we build

Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category

A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis

Retired decorator's Pokémon cards sell for £1.5M

Making the Buddha Head from Merv Whole Again

OpenAI and Anthropic cut their LLM prices by up to 80% within a few months. Why?

Where the Romans Fought (interactive map)

Root shell on Samsung TV

Active incident at Dreamhost forcing password reset