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.
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.