Is a laptop the most important device of the digital revolution? The aggression in the digital race between tech companies means changes are happening at unprecedented speed. However, laptops – the weapon of choice for professionals, students, and tech enthusiasts – still remain at the core of the changing world around us. Thanks to Intel’s latest plans, the future of laptops is about to become even more powerful and slimmer.
Intel’s announcement that its Lunar Lake laptop CPU series will integrate memory directly onto the processor SoC (system on a chip) is a game changer for how laptops will be designed and used. This is a return to form originally popularised by Apple and seen in smartphones and tablets. But what does this do for the future of laptops and the people who want to tinker with them?
This move to memory-on-package systems that will use LPDDR5X memory speeds things up not only with speeds of 8.5 gigatransfers per second (33 per cent faster than LPDDR5 memory) but also takes up less physical space with the potential to save up to 250 square millimetres. With laptops getting thinner and more power-efficient, we may need this level of integration. At what point, going forward, is a laptop outgrown by changing user needs? There are also power users, such as video editors, who need more than 32GB of RAM.
Intel’s approach hints at an ascendant future in which memory might even be a non-upgradable component of some laptops. ‘It’s competing in the ecosystem’ with something that’s exquisite but not expandable beyond the initial configuration,’ says Jim Johnson, an executive vice president at Intel. For those accustomed to extending the life or boosting the potency of their laptops through after-market modifications, the evolution presents a problem.
In the short term, the benefits of the move are obvious: better performance in ever-smaller footprints, at the cost of somewhat less flexibility in upgrades. Mark Hachman’s detailed analysis of the Lunar Lake series notes that such a move makes technical sense, but writes that ‘the question of whether the industry can support fixed memory configurations so users don’t have the luxury of changing their laptops’ needs over time remains to be seen.
Intel acknowledges it as a move into ‘the realm of non-upgradable memory’ but does include coded language about future roadmap turns that could bring ‘more traditional options’. It’s too early to say if and when we’ll see wider adoption of higher RAM capacities, let alone truly modular upgrade options once Intel, Samsung and the rest of the industry has fully bid farewell to DIMMs.
In short, a laptop, a kind of portable computer, turned out to be an irreplaceable device for a great variety of human activities including business, education, entertainment, etc. On the other hand, the development of the laptop was accompanied by the principles of persistently competitive features such as faster performance, longer battery life, slimmer and more attractive designs. The laptops contain core elements which are the processor (CPU), the memory (RAM), the storage (HDD or SSD), the display, and the keyboard, which can be carried everywhere for people to use at any time and any place conveniently.
Intel’s newest laptops herald a very real possibility of what laptops could and, perhaps, should be designed to look and act like in the very near future. It’s becoming clearer with each passing wave of progressively smaller and sleeker laptops that although this sort of integration and removal of all aspects essentially for the sake of compactness and power efficiency is heavily valued by industry, overall versatility and user agency is being sacrificed. It’s likely that laptops are here to stay in some form, and that hybrid machines are the types of devices we’ll be using on a daily basis. The form factor and usability of these devices will reflect technological possibilities as well as the needs and capacities of their users.
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