Modular laptops are few and far between, but the concepts and in-market products that I have seen seem to fall into two general categories: ones that are based around a removable system on module with the CPU and RAM soldered, and ones that are all-out discrete for everything, including socketed CPU, RAM, and if applicable, discrete graphics card. Separately upgradable storage seems the standard and bare minimum for all of them though.

Of these, the SOM concept have the potential to be thinner and lighter but you have to upgrade the entire module at once, while the everything separate concept can obviously allow for separate component upgrades while being thicker and heavier.

If a hypothetical manufacturer wanted you to dicide for them, which one would you choose? I think it mainly boils down to whether you think the tradeoff of thinness and lightness is worth having to upgrade the CPU, GPU and RAM as a single module instead of separately. Curious as to what people here think.

  • poVoq
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    23 years ago

    I don’t think there really is a choice of everything seperate, as it still ends up being a platform with everything either Intel or AMD based.

    For laptops there just doesn’t seem to be a feasible way to take various off the shelves parts and combine them.

    Maybe here and there you can supplement a SoC with some additional features but input output lanes are often limited and/or you end up with a secondary SoC like in the case of the PinePhone’s modem.

    • @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.mlOP
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      3 years ago

      Yeah, I think a benefit of compute modules in today’s tech environment is that it’s self contained and can be made for extremely backward and forward compatibility and let you use whatever compute hardware you want, especially one of the open source standards out there.

      (copied here from another one of my replies)