Lenovo

In this Vendor Showdown segment hosted by Addison Snell of Intersect360 Research and Rupak Biswas of NASA Ames Research Center, Martin Hegel of Lenovo focuses on the sharp rise in DRAM and NAND costs affecting the industry, a trend he dubs RAMageddon. He presents projections that memory prices will keep rising, with new manufacturing capacity arriving only in the second half of 2028 and no vendor planning a return to prior price levels, making current elevated costs the new normal. His survival guide advises reviewing actual memory requirements, citing a customer system provisioned at three gigabytes per core where most cores used under one or two gigabytes; optimizing operations by segregating workloads onto appropriately configured systems; balancing core count, memory bandwidth, and memory capacity in CPU selection; investing in application-level memory footprint optimization; and reconsidering GPU adoption, which becomes economically attractive sooner as memory costs climb. He then presents the Lenovo ThinkSystem SC777, a Grace Blackwell system with four Blackwell GPUs and about one terabyte of memory, fully direct-water-cooled with 45-degree-Celsius warm water and no fans or pumps. In the question round he argues cloud prices will follow the same increases with a delay, concedes the SC777 configuration is a price-performance rather than universally ideal choice, and clarifies that the system is designed to enable the best data-center PUE rather than possessing a PUE itself.