The ongoing semiconductor shortage has wreaked major havoc on the pricing of PC components such as CPUs and GPUs in 2021, you’d think that the situation would get better in 2022, unfortunately, the scenario appears bleak.
As per a report by Digitimes, the Taiwanese semiconductor giant TSMC has already raised its quotes by 10%-20% for both mature and advanced nodes starting this year.
This means that TSMC’s major customers such as AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA will also increase their product prices in the near future.
For AMD, the price hike is likely to come across its entire range of processors, including the 7nm based Ryzen 3000 and Ryzen 5000 processors, their upcoming 5nm based Ryzen 7000 processors will also bear the brunt of this.
The RDNA 2 based AMD GPUs are also expected to be more expensive in the future as they also depend on TSMCs 7nm process.
Speaking of GPUs, NVIDIA has recently raised the MSRP for multiple cards in the RTX 3000 Series and going by the report, the company’s upcoming 4000 Series is expected to be even more expensive since it has switched nodes from Samsung to TSMC’s 5nm architecture for their next-gen GPUs.
The source also reports that NVIDIA has already made prepayments to TSMC for long-term orders of the 5nm silicon for the RTX 4000 Series GPUs starting in 2022 as well.
Coming to Intel, the California-based giant is expected to be least affected by this new development as it makes most of its chips in-house.
The report states that Intel will also be hiking its pricing for multiple reasons, including the bump in the cost of wafer production outsourced to TSMC. The firm is also building new fabs to enable the in-house production of chips based on advanced nodes, which is likely to give Intel more incentive to drive costs higher to recuperate the additional investments.
The overall reports indicate that 2022 could potentially be a terrible year for the PC industry as well as the customers who have been facing very high prices for more than a year now.
If you are planning to build or buy a PC or upgrade components on your existing system, you should act fast before the prices are bumped up.
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