Intel’s latest laptops get rid of replaceable memory

It’s getting pretty hard to find a laptop with a user-accessible SO-DIMM slot to upgrade the memory. And it’s about to get a lot harder. Starting with its upcoming Lunar Lake laptop CPU series, Intel will install memory into the processor SoC itself, offering only 16GB or 32GB initially. Yes, Intel laptops are getting rid of user-replaceable RAM, at least for this series of chips.

Intel is following Apple’s lead here — the latter installs memory along with its home-built, Arm-based M processors, in the same way that memory is offered on smartphones and tablets. It means that these new Intel laptops will offer fewer choices to manufacturers, and none at all to consumers after the purchase.

“The technical part is that we want to have an exquisite notebook that will take on ecosystem competitors,” said Jim Johnson, a Senior Vice President at Intel. “And that’s what we built. And we think 16[GB] and 32[GB] is the right matchup and yes, it’s not upgradable beyond that, but this is the cornerstone of our architecture moving forward and we will offer those options in the future.”

The Lunar Lake package offered to laptop vendors uses LPDDR5X memory, topping out at 32 gigabytes and 8.5 gigatransfers per second. The memory on package system will save “up to 250 square millimeters” in space, which sounds a lot more impressive than .387 square inches. That’s less than half the size of a US postage stamp.

If you want to install or upgrade your own RAM, or you need more than 32GB of RAM — and lots of people do for high-end laptops — you’ll have to wait. According to Johnson, the “next turn of the roadmaps will offer more traditional options.” Higher RAM capacities seems like a given, but “more traditional options” may or may not mean that laptop manufacturers or end users will get access to memory expansion.

As Mark Hachman notes in his Lunar Lake deep-dive, this news makes technical sense as processors get smaller and more dependent upon lightning-fast memory for performance. But this news is particularly disheartening as we’re seeing wider adoption of the CAMM2 memory format, which allows for higher memory capacities at physically smaller sizes (and crucially, much less vertical space) without sacrificing modular upgrade options.