CEO: ‘what if, buckle your seatbelts gentlemen… we put a little bit of memory on the cpu?’
Everyone else in the room, looking at each other: ‘should we tell him, or…?’
Intel actually already tried that before back then on Lunar Lake, with for example Core Ultra 200V which comes with 2 LPDDR5X dies integrated directly into the CPU package, which back then allowed for up to 32GB of onboard RAM capacity. This was intended for ultra-portable devices like x86 tablets and embedded systems where the motherboard needs to be as small as possible, and the specific CPU model had a corresponding power and performance envelope for that use case. For that kind of devices this actually made sense.
Back in 2024 before the AI industry drove up the prices, Intel concluded that this wasn’t worth it because Intel had to purchase those RAM dies at a higher unit price than OEMs who specifically make RAM sticks and thus order RAM chips at much higher volume, in order to package onto their CPU packages themselves.
Guess they are changing their mind and bringing that back, for a completely different reasoning lol
Should we L2t him know?
It’s wild, like how are there not more RAM manufacturers sprouting up all over the place? Do you need one of those $400million danish machines to get started? I have no idea what it takes to make a RAM chip but there is clearly room in the market for a new manufacturer
Good news friend! Those machines are probably only 200 million each, because ram doesnt require quite the latest machines, way cheaper than you thought!
Bad news though friend! It’s not very economical to just buy one, because they’re so sensitive you need a cleanroom to house one. Then you need some really smart people to tune and maintain them, so you may as well buy a few, and now that cleanroom needs to be the size of 6 Costco’s.
Oops where did my 5 billion dollars go?
Stacked memory is nothing new. The Raspberry Pi did this, at least from version 1-3, and maybe 4.
You can do this with ARM chips because they don’t try to cook the computer. But with an Intel chip, they need loads of cooling, so I don’t see any way to stack RAM on top of an already overheating CPU.
Good strategy, want memory? Gotta buy our CPU as well
To be fair I think Apple does that and there is a speed benefit in bundling it together, their uram is very good at running LLMs - hence their high ram models sold out lighting fast.
I thought hbm would have already become standard by now. It’s been out for over 10 years. Years ago I thought it would be like 16 GB of HBM on the CPU package as layer 4 cache with ram slots as optional if you needed more.
Bundling, baby! Added benefit, it’s going to deprecate a whole bunch of motherboards.
It’s intel, they come up with a new socket variation at roughly the same rate that you make dinner.
meh the socket CPUs they used to make in the 90s were pretty good. literally just socket it into the mobo like you would ram. I liked those things.
That’s what’s profitable right now. Makes sense. But could the market come back down to ‘normal’ at some point? How long do we expect RAM to cost this much?
I believe this will happen, and I hate it:
It won’t come back down ever again and we’ll be forced to chose between paying a monthly subscription to use a VM on the cloud or pay an even higher price than now for the privilege of owning a PC.
Shit’s bad right now, but a shitnado is brewing.
I am thinking China is going to stir things up big time in the coming years. They are already doing this today with EVs. And now they have started with their own chip manufacturing as well.
I hope, anything can happen. But it will take them 5 years at the very least. That’s coincidentally what EVs took them, roughly.
Makes even more sense when you realize all these companies are going to be sitting on massive unused data centers filled with computers sitting idle. Of course they’re going to pivot to renting time on those systems.
Most of the big providers are already sold out of all their scheduled supply through 2027 and part of 2028, so at last another year even if something like CXMT scales to start to fill the market
But if the data center boom collapses suddenly they’re all making consumer ram again.
even if something like CXMT scales to start to fill the market
Can’t use hardware produced by the insidious Chinese. It would destroy our economy and open up all our devices to the evil kind of spyware.
When lead times grow, companies start ordering further and further out to make sure they won’t get stuck waiting in line.
The whole “sold out until end of 2027” thing should not be taken nearly so literally. Yes, memory is in high demand, but that doesn’t mean there’s literally a year and a half worth of gap between production capacity and demand. If someone magiced tons of memory into existance, most of those orders would not be ready to take delivery. We saw the same thing with the automotive chip shortages. There were tons of articles about crazy lead times, then once supply started catching up again it was suddenly a non issue.
