Jean Philippe Bouchard, research vice president with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers, said, “beyond the obvious pressure on prices of systems already announced by certain manufacturers, we might also see PC memory specifications lowered on average to preserve memory inventory on hand. The year ahead is shaping up to be extremely volatile.”
As last month’s IDC report stated, “the shortage threatens to derail the industry’s growth narrative around AI PC. IDC defines the AI PC as any PC with an NPU. Crucially, these devices tend to have more RAM (Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs require a minimum of 16GB).”
As more small language models and large language models move onto the device, its authors wrote, “memory becomes even more important, with many higher-end systems shifting toward 32GB or higher. Just as the industry is seeing a need to add more RAM, it has become prohibitively expensive to do so, even if they can get supply. This will result in higher prices, lower margins, or a potential downmix in the amount of RAM in new systems at the worst possible time for this to occur.”
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