And each channel can support at most one SO-DIMM connector TOTAL. So all the i7-700, i7-800, and i7-900 series mobile CPUs have two memory channels, and they can be accessed simultaneously (thus giving you dual-channel memory). 'The system memory controller supports only one SO-DIMM connector per channel.' I like p.22, section 2.1.4 Rules for Populating Memory Slots, which you quote: Perhaps you'll find something that I missed.Īlso, here's Intel's own comparison chart of the i7-720QM and i7-620M specs, which gives no hint that I can see indicating that one should support 4 memory slots, and the other only 2. Here are the specification documents for Intel's Core i5 and Core i7 mobile processors, if anyone wants to do some digging.

Whether you'll be able to get two 8GB DIMMs to work in them is a reasonable question, and should depend to some extent on the BIOS.

So the max memory supported by Lenovo is 8GB for the 2-memory-slot W510 models. Presumably, two slots is just cheaper to implement than four, plus this causes the dual-core machines to compete less with the quad-core machines, so perhaps there are marketing reasons involved. I didn't see anything in Intel's processor spec sheets that specified limits of two or four DIMMs for the integrated memory controller of the i7-620M or i5-560M. But as far as the number of memory slots goes, whether there are two DIMM slots or four seems to just depend on the board design. As playersnoopy indicates, the address spaces are the same between the processors. The integrated memory controller of the processor determines the max speed at which it can access memory.

quad-core W510 machines.Īccording to the tabook, the chipsets are the same. QFoam wrote:If the CPU sockets are the same, I would look at the exact chipset being used for the dual-core vs.

Thinkpad w530 ram slots