Club Benefits
At the beginning of this year, I told you this is going to be the year of the laptop — with price being the thing that could crash the party, which as you know is the biggest fear surrounding the RAM pricing crisis.
And while there have been some warning signs, such as Asus warning prices could go up just before CES 2026, laptops have remained somewhat steady (give or take a few laptops).
Well, I think I have the reason for that. Speaking with Nish Neelalojanan, Intel’s Senior Director of Product Management, he confirmed to Tom’s Guide that most laptop-making partners (known as OEMs) that Intel works with have “about 9 to 12 months of inventory.”
There are other things at play here, too, which I’ll talk about later. But it’s this bit in particular that should provide a window of relief in which to upgrade.
Surviving RAMageddon by planning ahead
“If anyone could predict the memory market, they would be rich by now,” Neelalojanen joked, as we started to talk about this situation. “That said, a lot of our OEM partners have about 9 to 12 months inventory…when it comes to laptops, there is a long lead time of memory securing.”
This comes down a lot to how this business works. While we’ve seen what this year’s slate of laptops look like, I’ve no doubt that the likes of Asus and MSI already have their eyes on the next couple of years (at least). It pays to plan far ahead and start to stock up for future releases, and that seems to be what has happened here.
I did fear for the Dell XPS 14 — coming in at $2,050 over last year’s $1,699. But as a Dell rep confirmed, the one shown at CES isn’t an entry-level configuration, and that cheaper systems that are similar to last year’s costs will be coming in February.
Working smarter, not harder
There are also some tweaks made to the architecture of Intel Core Ultra Series 3, and work that Team Blue is doing in the background that could combat this.
First, the L3 cache on the chip has been significantly increased, and the E-cores have access to it. This is a level of shared memory that acts almost as a gate bridge between the CPU and the RAM, which can take some work on.
And with up to 18MB that can be utilized when the laptop’s relying on those power efficiency cores, in Nish’s own words, “all of that caching is definitely going to help with not relying too much on system memory.”
Second, more control over how much system memory is used. I saw a demo of a software memory slider, which gives you instant control over how much memory is accessible to the chip. This is being made available to what Microsoft calls the ISVS (Independent Software Vendors), so they can have better control over how system memory is utilized for their apps.
“So there is a whole bunch of opening up system, adding more cache, opening up system memory more accessible to software beyond windows, and also more tools and tips so that memory allocation is done more effectively,” Neelalojanen added.
Outlook
While this isn’t a silver bullet against RAMageddon (AI is going to consume the majority of the planet’s DRAM chips after all), it’s encouraging to see two key things happening here.
First, most laptop makers have planned ahead. This should hopefully insulate new systems from price increases for at least the next few months. And second, it’s forcing companies like Microsoft to look into their software and make it more efficient.
For too long, the likes of Windows 11 have set their sights squarely on packing in new features without really thinking about their efficiency, and for good reason, because RAM prices weren’t being impacted. Now that they are, it’s time to work on the plumbing rather than give us new Copilot features for the sake of it.
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