Intel recognizes the memory squeeze that’s been a plague on the PC market for the past several months. While highlighting options like Wildcat Lake and older Raptor Lake options, Intel’s Nish Neelalojanan, senior director of product management for Intel’s Client Computing Group, sat down with Tom’s Hardware at Computex 2026 to discuss the company’s outlook on the computing market, ranging from Nvidia’s recent RTX Spark announcement to ongoing memory shortages, saying “something has to give” with the latter.
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“Longer term, I think something has to give, right? The over-inflation, we will have to keep an eye out,” Neelalojanan told me. “But if I could predict the memory market, I would be rich in stock.”
I asked Neelalojanan more specifically if Intel was planning around memory shortages and making any adjustments to its strategy going forward. And the answer, surprisingly, is yes, though not in the way you might expect. Neelalojanan pointed to Raptor Lake and Wildcat Lake as products that address memory shortages currently, and said that the company will continue to support products on older memory standards as long as it makes sense.
“We do have products that support DDR4 on both desktop and mobile. Raptor Lake, we’re not end-of-life-ing any of them; they’re there. We’ll continue to make sure that there are products which can take care of older memory technologies if they’re available and cheap,” Neelalojanan told me. “Second thing is, we are making sure we are validating lower configs [for Wildcat Lake] as well. Wildcat Lake starts at 8GB. Wildcat Lake is a single-channel product, so there are products which can leverage low memory and give reasonably good performance.”
Wildcat Lake, and entry-level laptop designs more broadly, have been a big focus of Computex. Presumably in response to the MacBook Neo, Intel, of course, has its Wildcat Lake options, but Qualcomm is targeting that market, as well, with its new Snapdragon C chips. AMD doesn’t have a product targeting this market of sub-$600 laptops quite yet, but we plan on asking the company about its plans this week at Computex.
We’ve seen a shift toward cheaper options on the desktop, as well. AMD just reintroduced the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and launched the Ryzen 7 7700X3D, two CPUs that use older architectures. Under normal circumstances, they’d be unamusing at best. Under current circumstances, they’re putting components into a market that’s begging for them.
“Large memory is completely overshadowing any CPU prices, right, memory and storage… CPU is not any more determining your system price point,” Neelalojanan said. “We are working with a lot of indigenous memory suppliers and validating them, so we’re doing everything we can… it’s not just one, two or three. If there are local-specific memory vendors, like in [China] and now Indonesia is even bringing up a couple of them. We’re trying to validate as much as we can so there’s enough choice that people can get pockets of relief.”
Intel didn’t, however, say that it’s reintroducing any products along the lines of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition. At the moment, it seems Intel is focused more on supporting DDR4-based options and keeping them on the market, at least until the memory squeeze loosens its grip.
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