#pc-pricing

#pc-pricing

Speaking with analysts on Intel's Q4 earnings call Thursday, CFO David Zinsner admitted the company was caught with its pants down after it misjudged demand for its datacenter products, leading to a capacity crunch during the quarter. Zinsner said six months ago "every hyperscale customer" was sending signals they planned to order a smaller number of high-core count chips. They soon changed their tune and demand for Intel's Xeon products increased considerably over the third and fourth quarters.

Just weeks after raising the price of its RAM modules, Framework has announced that it's also increasing the price of its desktop PC in response to the global memory shortage. The Framework Desktop with 32GB of RAM and an AMD Ryzen AI Max 385 chip now starts at $1,139, instead of $1,099. "We held off on it for as long as we could, but we had to update our Framework Desktop pricing today to account for the massive increase in LPDDR5x pricing from our suppliers," Framework says in a post on X.

Really, though, the show just confirmed what was apparent since RAM prices skyrocketed over the last few months, driven by demand from AI datacenters. As Samsung's marketing leader, Wonjin Lee, told Bloomberg at CES: "There's going to be issues around semiconductor supplies, and it's going to affect everyone. Prices are going up even as we speak."