Laptops cannot exactly get smaller and thinner without components doing the same, and micron knows this well.
The company has just made the formal introduction of a low-profile single-sided, double data rate 3 (DDR3) SODIMM.
That means a small and thin memory module with chips on a single side.
Made out of 30nm DDR3L-RS components, it has a single-rank, x8 configuration and, though it is pin-to-pin compatible with current connectors, it can fit in smaller notebooks and ultrabooks.
The thickness is key here. Since the RAM chips are on a single side, the module is just 3 mm thick, 35% thinner than the standard.
Next-generation ultrabooks, probably even Haswell-based ones, are very likely to use the memory.
The modules will enter mass production this spring, but samples of the Single-Sided SODIMM connectors will be mass-produced only from June onwards. It is a good thing the module is, as we have said above, backwards compatible.