ASUS always collaborates with its partners to create something new and spice up the market. Just look at their catalog – lots of partnerships and collaborations everywhere to bring the greatest machines to the market and they dare to try.
For this time, it’s something hidden under the hood – more specifically, the back panel. When we take out the back panel, this is what we see.
It might not look like much – but look closer at the RAM and the CPU. They’re both integrated closely together.
If we look even further, both the RAM and CPU are integrated into a single PCB, then the entire PCB is mounted on the motherboard itself. We can confirm this by looking at the motherboard from an angle.
SoM stands for system-on-a-module, which is completely different from SoC (system-on-a-chip). This has a few advantages over the traditional motherboard layout. When the CPU and RAM are closely positioned to each other, you can shorten the trace (technically the wire length) hence decreasing ping and also further increasing speed while also increasing stability thanks to less chances of crosstalk.
Thankfully, ASUS also brought us another surprise – the SoM used on the motherboard of the laptop itself. It is here that we can see the SoM is a very thin board with both the CPU die and also two RAM chips on it.
From our speculation, the SoM will definitely have its own advantages too. Firstly, the entire system is said to be more efficient. Not because it will consume less power, but because both the CPU and RAM can be cooled together. ASUS is also covering the entire SoM module with liquid metal. That’s insane.
Then, since the distance between the CPU and the RAM is shortened now, we can expect better RAM performance too. From what we’ve told, the RAM on this laptop is at 7200MHz – that also means your integrated graphic’s VRAM is going to be superbly quick in comparison with the conventional motherboard layout.
But, everyone has their own pros and cons. While the SoM does bring a few notable advantages, I’d like to nitpick something – the lack of RAM upgradability. Since SoM means the RAM chips are soldered onto the SoM board, we do not have any SO-DIMM slots to add more RAM.
When can we expect the SoM to appear on laptops? Soon.
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