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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

> You could have manufactured enough ARC video cards to meet demand.

I don't know if anyone told you, but GDDR is included in the current RAM shortage.

The upcoming cards for local inference use LPDDR (which is also not immune to the shortage) - but maybe it's time Intel gets back to its roots and produce some memory chips. CXL Optane would also shine as a KV cache store.

Intel stopped making memory in 1985. Everyone who ever did that work there is retired or dead today. Any random startup will have the same likelihood of success that Intel could ever hope for.

Except, you know, the billions of dollars and platform and contacts and industrial engineers and experience building clean room fabs and political leverage and...

It took CXMT 10 years to make a profitable DDR5 line, with a similar advantage of billions of dollars, contracts, political leverage, clean room fabs, and allegedly stolen IP.

It would probably be easier for Micron to double their memory production, than it would be for Intel to beat Micron's annual shipments.

CXMT was hindered by various sanctions and lawsuits for the "allegedly" stolen IP. Intel can cleanly partner with Micron like they did for their Optane line (which btw can also offload a lot of the demand via CXL DIMMs).

They also don't have to match Micron, they just need to introduce sufficient marginal supply to a supply constrained market or use it to their advantage by making the memory for their own platforms by-passing the shortage everyone else has to contend with.

Optane wasn't DRAM; that was literally the whole point of it's existence. Intel hasn't proven that they can make DDR4 let alone LPDDR5 or GDDR, and even if they did it wouldn't have helped produce Arc GPU chips since they were supply-constrained by TSMC.

Intel could have piles of GDDR sitting around, and Arc GPUs would still be have limited supply. It's just the way the product was made.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/278412793429

More of these would be immensely helpful, right about now given the inference landscape.

Even with insane memory prices, 16GB of GDDR7 is ~$200-300 at most. That by itself isn't responsible for GPU prices to explode. The fabs are just producing more profitable chips, so everything else becomes more expensive as they compete for a much smaller remaining capacity at TSMC.

Definitely not just a memory problem.

>> You could have manufactured enough ARC video cards to meet demand.

> I don't know if anyone told you, but GDDR is included in the current RAM shortage

    My understanding is that the 2025 RAM shortage
    did not cause the 2022/2023 ARC shortages.

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