What if it is wired to think?
I think these are likely different only by way of their level of complexity. We simply substitute a word like "think" when the reactions to stimuli are far too complex and numerous for us to track fully. But ultimately said "thinking" is made up to many, many cells following those same stimulus/reaction patterns.
This CPU analogy of yours doesn’t comport very well with the article we’re commenting on, which detailed some specific experiments that show cells are not reacting in a predefined way that is due to their ‘wiring’, contrary to previous and maybe incomplete understanding of how cells work. I don’t know if the RAM analogy helps since the surprise is that non-brain cells do have memory and do cooperate with other non-brain cells to solve certain problems, and these collections of non-brain cells can apparently remember solutions to problems over time. So yes, memory can help with anticipating events, but that really supports the idea that cells are dynamic and doing some non-trivial processing vs the possibly outdated notion that they’re hard-wired and deterministic.
I'm not even a cocktail biologist, but my understanding is cells effectively operate via a web of complex chemical reactions, so the notion of a cell holding primitive models might be analogous to the way a CPU executes an assembly instruction: not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired it's (nearly - barring solar radiation, I suppose, which incidentally also goes for cells) inevitable that it will react to a stimulus in a predefined way (even though the way cells react to stimuli is far more advanced than a CPU).
In a similar way, "anticipating events" could involve an analogue to computer memory: the processes that have run so far have lead to certain state being saved to memory that will now influence how the system reacts to stimuli in a way that's different from how it reacted before (e.g. sum a value with the value stored in a register).