Few people know this, but Intel did not start as a company focused on making processors. The company was involved in semiconductors from the beginning, but it started with RAM. Its first commercial products were the 3101 SRAM and 1103 DRAM chips. Intel moved into processors later, and that move eventually turned it into the giant we know today.
During its decades in business, Intel has designed and manufactured many types of semiconductors, including RAM, processors, graphics solutions, graphics accelerators, networking products and SSDs. However, it has stopped making many of these products when they were no longer profitable. One of the most notable examples was Intel Optane DC, which used the 3D XPoint architecture developed together with Micron.
Intel Eyes RAM Production Again
Now, with the current DRAM crisis, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has hinted that the company could start manufacturing RAM again. This could be very profitable for Intel, as current DRAM prices are so high that even Chinese companies see value in investing billions of dollars to build new chip production plants.
Intel is considering making CPUs with integrated RAM, something it already did with Lunar Lake, a generation of SoCs that placed the memory on the same substrate as the other components. Intel’s CEO admitted that the company previously did not want to invest in memory because it considered it a basic product. However, with the huge growth of AI, he no longer sees memory as a basic product and is now looking at investing in it differently.
Intel ZAM is currently one of Intel’s most important projects in this area, as it promises to double the bandwidth of HBM4 memory while also improving operating temperatures.
