Compression Attached Memory Modules may make upgradable laptops a thing again

Enlarge / Samsung shared this rendering of a CAMM ahead of the publishing of the CAMM2 standard in September. (credit: Samsung)

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.