The impacts of the silicon scarcity are expected to last until 2022, when AMD, Intel, and Nvidia are expected to raise costs for CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs. According to DigiTimes, TSMC has hiked its bids by 10-20% for both mature and advanced nodes this year, causing its partners to boost their pricing as well.
According to the source, this will result in a price increase for all AMD processors that use TSMC’s 7nm and 5nm parts, which currently includes AMD’s Zen 2 architecture up to AMD’s upcoming Zen 4 platform, which will be released later this year. Although DigiTimes did not provide any information about AMD’s RDNA2 graphics cards, given that they use TSMC’s 7nm technology, we should assume a price increase for those GPUs as well.
Unfortunately, the bad news is that Nvidia’s future graphics cards (dubbed the RTX 40-series for now) would employ TSMC’s new cutting-edge 5nm process rather than silicon from Samsung fabs, as it did with the RTX 30-series. Nvidia has also made prepayments to TSMC for long-term orders of 5nm silicon for the RTX 40-series GPUs starting in 2022, according to DigiTimes.
This means that the RTX 40-series might launch with high MSRPs right away and that high pricing could last the entire generation. This, of course, will be on top of the current shortage, further inflating the prices of these GPUs, especially if Nvidia expects to deliver the RTX 40-series in 2022.
Intel is the least likely of the three firms to be impacted by these changes. Intel, on the other hand, is rumored to be raising prices for a variety of reasons. The first is connected to its chips, which have already been outsourced to TSMC. We should anticipate Intel to pass on increased prices to consumers because TSMC is increasing its quotations by a big amount.
Intel is also said to be moving forward with the in-house development of advanced manufacturing nodes and the construction of new fabs, giving the company more incentive to raise prices to recoup the additional expenses.
As a result of all of this, DigiTimes forecasts that 2022 will be a particularly difficult year for the PC industry as a whole. PC demand is expected to slow down quarter by quarter this year, while costs for crucial components such as CPUs and GPUs are expected to continue to rise. This is due to growing fab costs as well as other variables like high shipping costs and rising inflation, not to mention the silicon shortage.
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