I heard the DRAM shortage has started affecting PC sales, and I would think that it would be hurting Intel’s bottom line.
I remember hearing Intel was looking for customers for its fabs, so I suppose they have some capacity sitting idle.
Why not use some of that capacity to make DRAM themselves? If they can make CPUs running at multi-gigahertz and contains DRAM controllers, surely DDR5 memory is not out of their reach?
Intel can use up their excess capacities, making currently high-priced DRAM for profit, gain goodwill for rescuing the PC market, which in turn will sell more Intel CPUs as well. Sounds like a win to me. What do you think?
Edit: I know nothing about semiconductor manufacturing so feel free to tell me how Intel’s process is not suitable for making DRAM, or any other reason why it would not be smart for them to do that.
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If Intel decided to make DRAM, with their track record, it would definitely be focused on the AI sector. More general supply would probably affect the market as a whole, but they wouldn’t be the ones to come save us.
You have to remember that RAM manufacturers love that this is happening, it’s their favorite thing. They get to sell all their production to a limited amount of users, and not having to deal with the average consumer streamlines the fuck out of large portions of their company. Anyone still in the regular consumer market is banking on things to get worse for us.
Intel can use up their excess capacities, making currently high-priced DRAM for profit, gain goodwill for rescuing the PC market, which in turn will sell more Intel CPUs as well. Sounds like a win to me. What do you think?
searches
It sounds like they are, in fact, looking into making DRAM. Just that they’re interested in making better DRAM for AI applications.
American chip giant Intel has partnered with Japanese tech and investment powerhouse SoftBank to build a stacked DRAM substitute for HBM. According to Nikkei Asia, the two industry behemoths set up Saimemory to build a prototype based on Intel technology and patents from Japanese academia, including the University of Tokyo. The company is targeting a completed prototype and mass production viability assessment by 2027, with an end goal of commercialization before the end of the decade.
Most AI processors use HBM or high-bandwidth memory chips, which are perfect for temporarily storing the massive amount of data that AI GPUs process. However, these ICs are complex to manufacture and are relatively expensive. Aside from that, they get hot pretty quickly and require relatively more power. The partnership aims to solve this by stacking DRAM chips and then figuring out a way to wire them more efficiently. By doing so, the stacked DRAM chip’s power consumption is halved versus a similar HBM chip.
If successful, SoftBank says that it wants to have priority for the supply of these chips. At the moment, only three companies produce the latest HBM chips: Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron. The insatiable demand for AI chips means that HBM supply can be hard to get by, so Saimemory aims to corner the market with its substitute, at least for Japanese data centers. This will also be the first time that Japan aims to become a major memory chip supplier in over 20 years.
I suppose if they can make better AI-oriented DRAM than the Big Three and make enough of it to satisfy AI demand at some point, that might make the Big Three redirect some of their output back to DIMMs.
They had aspirations to make DRAM less useful/needed for some cases.
It more or less failed for a variety of reasons.
The concept was called Far Memory as a step between DRAM and SSDs. Lots of stories I can’t really share from back in the day
This article talks a bit about far memory:
https://dzone.com/articles/far-memory-unleashed-what-is-far-memory
They did. Intel quit making DRAM 42 years ago.
Look up asianometry on YT. They are the goto source for edutainment info about fab related stuff. In a nutshell, different kinds of bearded nude virgin witches and wizards are needed. One uses radio magic, the other creates orc capacitor armies from the fluorinated depths of Mordor.
why do they have to be nude?
Better cooling
Exhaust needs to clear for outputs and inputs.
Dunno. It is an EEVBlog rule by king Dave.
that makes sense, dave does make the rules.
Because just praying to the machine god wont work, that is for when the magic is already infused. To truly create rocks that can think, one must shred such societal confinement and bare welcome the machine spirit and allow it to pass through them.
Or so I am told.
Intel used to make their own motherboards and I feel like I remember seeing Intel branded RAM back then. But that was ~25 years ago.
I’m thinking it could’ve been rebranded stuff made by other companies. Like how most of Amazon basics is relabeled AliExpress/temu stuff. I also have no idea and am just conjecturing.
It’s a valid enough question, and one that I’ve asked myself also.
Intel already produce some form of RAM to act as cache for their processors, I wonder how hard it would be (and how long) it would take for them to utilise excess fab space to churn out DRAM modules.
Even if they ended up mostly selling the final modules into the AI black-hole, it should still have a deflationary effect on pricing in the market as a whole.
Even if it’s not practical to do so I imagine a number of companies that ‘nearly make ram’ in any sense are looking if they can. My hope is that this brings up new competitive markets, but that won’t happen quickly regretfully.
Doubt the could make them.
Either they have a clause in a contract somewhere that prevents them or they don’t think they have the in-house experts to get a viable product to market before the market settles the new high price as the norm.
Intel has traditionally pursued high margin markets, my guess is that Intel considered the RAM market too competitive, and not high margin enough.
They have tried to corner the market with for instance RAMBUS which Pentium 4 initially was dependent on, where they tried to create a protected (high profit) market for themselves. But they are not very interested in markets where they don’t hold controlling patent rights, again because controlling the market allows for high margin.That’s actually very close to the history of what happened. Intel did make DRAM but got out of the market when Japanese RAM flooded the market in the 80s because the margins were too small to be profitable.
RAMBUS was licensed technology that Intel didn’t make silicon for, only implemented support on their chips and northbridges. It died because it was awfully expensive the onerous licensing reduced adoption to almost nil so it never hit volume economy.
Intel owned a major share of RAMBUS.
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