New world's thinnest LPDDR5X memory from Samsung could bode well for handheld gaming PCs

Even in the world of PC gaming things have been slowly taking a low-power, AI-centric turn. Gaming handhelds with better battery life and low-power laptops—now including ones built on Arm architecture with Snapdragon X chips—are all the rage and I can't say I mind, to be honest. Who doesn't love more convenient gaming? That's why it's always exciting when there's news like this, that fast, low-power memory has just got even thinner.

Samsung has started mass producing the «industry’s thinnest» 12nm 12 GB/16 GB LPDDR5X packages. 

At 0.65 mm, these new DRAM chips are 0.06 mm thinner than your usual LPDDR5X ones, which might not sound like a massive reduction but can make a load of difference in a bunch of use cases. We're talking sub-millimetre overall thickness, here.

Talk has thus far mostly surrounded how this thinner DRAM will benefit phones, which is understandable because mobile devices will be a primary use case and there's obviously a wide market for it. But we're PC gamers, here, and thin LPDDR5X memory is far from irrelevant to PC gaming.

Let's go over what it won't affect, first. Obviously this won't affect our most treasured gaming PCs because these don't use LPDDR RAM and instead use regular DDR memory. It also probably won't affect your average gaming laptop that uses slottable RAM sticks because these laptops opt for upgradeability or cheap cost over thinness.

What it might affect, though, are low-power (duh) and slim devices like thin gaming laptops and handheld gaming PCs. And given that this seems to be the direction that gaming tech is heading in general, a new record for the world's thinnest LPDDR5X RAM is quite exciting.

JEDEC published the LPDDR5X spec in 2021, and since then Samsung and other chip makers have pushed the faster memory into the low-power market. It's about as fast as regular DDR5 memory and now features in some of the best thin gaming laptops such as the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024).

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