Intel senior director of product management Nish Neelalojanan told Tom’s Hardware at Computex 2026 on June 2 that the company views ongoing memory price inflation as unsustainable and plans to keep its DDR4-supporting Raptor Lake lineup on the market as a pressure valve. “Longer term, I think something has to give — the over-inflation, we will have to keep an eye out,” Neelalojanan said. He added that Intel would not end-of-life Raptor Lake and would keep products available for “older memory technologies if they’re available and cheap.” On the budget end, the company is also validating Wildcat Lake — which starts at 8GB in a single-channel configuration — as a low-memory entry point for affordable laptops. Neelalojanan stopped short of announcing any new DDR4 product launches comparable to AMD’s recent re-release of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and the new Ryzen 7 7700X3D, both priced under $350 with DDR4 or DDR5 support.
Neelalojanan noted that memory and storage costs now overshadow CPU pricing as the primary driver of overall system cost. To broaden supply options, Intel said it is actively validating chips against regional memory suppliers in markets including China and Indonesia — “if there are local-specific memory vendors, we’re trying to validate as much as we can so there’s enough choice that people can get pockets of relief.” The comments land against a worsening backdrop: Framework recently warned of continued RAM and SSD price increases through 2026, SK Group’s chairman has suggested the memory shortage could persist until 2030, and a new HUDIMM specification emerged at Computex specifically aimed at lowering DDR5 prices for budget PCs.