oh would you look at that Dell's done it again it was enough to have a proprietary motherboards power supplies
cases and an upgradable laptop that never actually got an upgrade now you
have to have proprietary memory as well
stop it jeez what what okay okay oh wait
so anyone can use this memory standard they invented this changes everything in
fact this Dell Precision 7670 might be
the most important laptop of 2022 that's
because with at the ability to upgrade memory on a laptop at all could have
become a thing of the past don't believe me well you will soon after you believe
the segue to our sponsor the ridge their new beveled rings come in premium
materials like carbon fiber tungsten and 24 karat gold and include two lost and
resizing protection exchanges get yours at the link down below I don't blame you
for being skeptical Dell has a long and stored history of completely bogus
propriety hairy crap one of the most recent ones being the Alienware area 51m
a laptop that Dell said would be upgradeable and until it came time to
actually offer the upgrades and then they got all well technically it was as
long as you stay within the same Hardware generation on us so what makes
me trust that the upgradeable memory we're talking about today will actually
be upgradeable it's because rather than going it alone Dell is working with jck
and by extension jde members to get their new memory module turned into to
an open standard for laptop memory going forward and it is super cool the first
thing that jumps out when we remove the bottom panel of the Precision 7670 is
the massive green memory module here that looks like no memory module I've
ever seen before this is the cam module
or compression attached memory module and looks pretty cool I guess but why
well currently the memory in your laptop is probably more like what's in this XPS
15 sodm or small outline dim modules
have been around for 25 years and that's
one heck of a run for technology but with the speeds we're expecting to see
in the coming years they're simply running out of gas why good old signal
Integrity the longer the wire the greater the signal loss and the greater
the latency look at the fastest memory products on the market hbm or high
bandwidth memory is mounted right on the package mere millimeters away from the
process processor that it serves the gddr6 memory on a 4090 all of that is
within a couple cm of the GPU die this
keeps the wires as short as possible by
comparison the chips on a sodum might as well be in Narnia with a minimum wire
length of around 72
cm this is super easy to see on our XPS
15 the CPU is soldered to the motherboard right here and the traces
need to travel all the way underneath these memory modules back up through the
connector and then around finally into
the package dies there are ddr5 sodm and
laptops however if you've paying close attention you've probably noticed that
machines with soldered RAM have been enjoying a speed Advantage compared to
their sodum equipped competitors for current gen ddr5 it's not an
insurmountable problem the theoretical Max for sodum is about 10,000 megga
transfers per second but it's already proving to be pretty difficult in the
real world to get those kind of speeds and ddr6 will definitely surpass even
that theoretical limit you're probably wondering why we can't just simply turn
these sodum connectors around that's a good question and our best guess is that
it just becomes impractical to pack enough zigzagging traces in this small
little area so that every single wire is the same length something that is
crucial to maintain perfect signal timing now let's turn our attention to
cam we've got the CPU right here and the
connector uh yeah you can't get much closer than that even with the largest
cam modules we're looking at a 50% reduction in distance to the CPU that is
fantastic but there's another big reason laptop manufactures have been soldering
down RAM physical size if you're looking
to make the thinnest and lightest machine you can the sodum connectors can
easily end up being the tallest component on your motherboard so if even
a couple of millimeters can be saved by soldering down that RAM it's going to
happen unfortunately such devices are completely unupgraded
mitigate it on top of supporting much
higher memory speeds cam is 57% thinner
than sodm that helps not only keep devices thinner but even helps
facilitate better airflow over the memory packages back to speed for a
second for the moment cam only has a speed Advantage at 128 GB of RAM but
Dell wasn't trying to set any speed records on its first outing annoyingly
the business users that use the Precision lineup want stability instead
of allo performance so we'll have to wait until cam shows up in alien wear or
something to see how fast it really can go not everything about cam is radical
though mechanically this design is very novel but electrically it is very
similar to sodm the bill of materials between the two is nearly identical so
switching between Cam and sodm is purely just a packaging problem there's even a
cam to sodm adapter they're so electrically interoperable this is also
pretty cool see how there are two sodum slots on a single cam adapter that's
because cam supports two memory channels per module using shared ground pins to
reduce the total number of connections and because of these similarities and
simplifications cam shouldn't be more expensive than sodum in the long term
currently you can expect to pay about $1 per gab more for cam than sodum but
there are no licensing phase to use the design so as the wonders of economies of
scale come into play and more of these modules get made we can expect the price
to come down to match or even slightly undercut sodm just like how we've
undercut ourselves by making the color block hoodie only $50 LTT Store.com it's
not perfect though cam offers a less flexible upgrade path than sodm for
instance if you want to go to 64 GB from 32 there's no way to reuse
the RAM that's already in your laptop the cam module you just remove it and
then you have to put a whole new one in and that assumes that the new one even
fits like motherboards and power supplies all cam modules should come in
standard sizes but they are more than one standard size for instance this 128
GB module is much larger than the 32 GB
one we have in our system but then again
sodum users can run into similar issues as well especially when it comes to
double-sided modules another Point worth mentioning is that the standard doesn't
appear to be 100% nailed down so we could potentially end up in a draft end
sort of situation those of you that aren't Elder nerds back in 2006 Wireless
networking was in a similar spot to where laptop memory is now router
manufacturers wanted to continue pushing the envelope for Speed and network
capacity in their products but thanks to a bunch of biger between Intel broadcom
Texas Instruments and others the 802.11n now called Wi-Fi 4 only existed
as a draft standard in spite of this router brand started selling draft end
products anyway only some of which ended
up being compatible with the 802.11n standard when it was finalized
later this led to some customers buying bleeding edge routers that promptly
turned into E-Waste the same thing could happen with this current iteration of
Cam to be clear I doubt the specifications for cam are going to
change very much but we know that ECC support is still coming and all it takes
is for one pin to go from ground to Signal or something like that to make
the memory in this laptop in compatible with future modules you might buy on new
egg or wherever in the future so with that in mind should you take a risk on
this machine well first of all the Precision 7670 probably wasn't made for
you anyway this is a machine you get your boss to buy for you it has a bunch
of features you can easily pitch to a business like smart card reader for
greater security systems management certified drivers that sort of stuff
it's the kind of product where realistically you're buying a whole
Fleet of them with a service contract anyway so you know upgrading something
for your it Department to worry about the good news is that if you do end up
with one of these through work it's a sick machine to take home and play with
off hours the star of the show is absolutely the 16-in 4K OLED display I'm
pretty sure this is the same panel that's found in the xps15 and it is
possibly one of the best laptop displays on the market it has excellent color
accuracy near-perfect blacks and low input lag to make gaming much more
enjoyable than other business laptops our model supports a Quadro A2000 GPU
which is essentially an RTX 3050 TI that
is downclocked slightly to improve stability under extended loads hours is
slim version here so this is uh not exactly thin or light by any means at
5.75 lb but if you want even chunkier
version well the performance version has a GPU that can go up to a Quadro
a5500 which has similar performance to a laptop RTX 380 TI this thing is going to
be a sleeper gaming Beast the rest of
the laptop is business as usual for Dell's business division excellent
keyboard loads of I/O and surprisingly good trackpad to boot now it's time for
business as usual at LT telling you about the segue to our sponsor Zoho one
if you run a business you know how hard it is to keep everything organized but
Zoho one is designed to help run your entire business through a single unified
platform you can replace your Patchwork of cloud applications Legacy tools and
paper-based processes with one operating
system Zoho one allows your team to collect leads in one place close deals
quicker create quotes and invoices sign contracts digitally and track every key
metric along the way and when you're out of the office you can use their mobile
apps to work on the go I'm working still whether it's sales
marketing Finance analytics or support Zoho one has got you covered sign up for
Zoho one today using the link below and get a free 30-day trial with no credit
card required so if you like this video maybe watch our review of the XPS 13
plus it is very strange but I also liked
it