RAM in today's consumer products

The architecture of RAM chips has stayed the same for tens of years, even if they were produced on smaller and smaller technologies. Things are finally changing, in the sense that the PC industry finally adopted stacked memory modules for graphics cards. Other PC components and consumer electronics still use single layer RAM chips, so let's take a look at some memory placements.

1. Desktop computers

In custom built desktop PCs and in most brand name PCs the RAM chips are soldered onto small circuit boards, which are installed into memory slots on the motherboard, close to the CPU. These chips are usually single layer, but large capacity stacked chips are coming very soon.

All-in-one desktop computers (and mini PCs) usually come with SODIMM (laptop) memory, because they use less power and take up less space. Some manufacturers use a slightly different approach - trying to save a couple of bucks on the slots - they solder the chips right onto the motherboard and maybe install one memory slot for future upgrades.

2. Laptop/Notebook/Netbook Computers

Laptop computers come with SODIMM slots, soldered memory chips or both (just like AIO/Mini computers).

3. Smartphones and tablets

Smartphones and tablets are practically complete computers, with all the main components. Usually we find one or two RAM chips on the logic board right next to the processor (SoC). In the latest gadgets the RAM and Flash NAND storage are combined into the same chip by stacking.

This is the logic board of the Apple iPad Pro, which is arguably a high end tablet PC. A smartphone's logic board looks about the same, but is much smaller and usually has just one RAM chip.

4. Video cards

The average laptop and desktop video card uses GDDR3 or GDDR5 RAM chips, soldered onto the video card, around the graphics processor.

This is the latest nVidia video card, called the Geforce GTX 980Ti. As you can see, a large board surface area is occupied by the RAM chips, even though the total is just 6GB of GDDR5.
AMD and Intel have improved their memory technology, by using stacked memory chips (called HBM) and installing them onto the same interposer as the GPU or integrated GPU (in Intel CPUs).

This is the AMD Radeon R9 Nano video card, which uses stacked HBM (High Bandwidth Memory). It has 4 stacks of four layer RAM chips, which add up to 4GB of High Bandwidth Memory.

Intel chose to integrate a single eDRAM chip right next to the Iris Pro iGPU. Depending on the model number, the iGPU can have 64MB or 128MB of so-called L4 cache, which caches textures, improving 3D graphics performance by up to 200%, compared to an equivalent iGPU without its own memory.

5. Gaming Consoles XBOX/PlayStation

The most recent generation of gaming consoles use custom octa-core AMD APUs with 8GB of RAM.

Sony went with the the Jaguar octa-core AMD APU and 8GB of GDDR5 memory in the PlayStation 4, while Microsoft chose to integrate some eDRAM on the AMD APU and use 8GB of moch slower DDR3 memory in the XBOX ONE.

In the future we can expect the whole PC/console industry to adopt one of the versions of HBM memory. Consoles and laptops will probably use an APU with HBM, while on video cards it's already confirmed that both AMD and nVidia will switch to HBM completely, once the production of these stacked high speed RAM chips really takes off.