this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2025
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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.