The effects of the silicon shortage continue to linger as AMD, Intel and Nvidia are believed to increase prices of CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs during 2022. As reported by the DigiTimes, TSMC has already raised its quotes by 10-20% for both mature and advanced nodes starting this year, forcing its partners to also increase prices.
For AMD, the report claims that this means a price hike will come to all its processors that take advantage of TSMC's 7nm and 5nm parts, which currently includes AMD's Zen 2 architecture all the way up to AMD's future Zen 4 platform arriving later this year. DigiTimes did not mention any details pertaining to AMD's RDNA2 graphics cards, but we can fully expect those GPUs to get a price hike as well since they rely on TSMC's 7nm process.
Unfortunately, the bad news also extends to Nvidia to a large degree, as its future graphics cards (known as the RTX 40-series for now) reportedly use TSMC's new cutting edge 5nm process instead of silicon from Samsung fabs as Nvidia did with the RTX 30-series. DigiTimes also reports that Nvidia has already made prepayments to TSMC for long-term orders of 5nm silicon for the RTX 40-series GPUs starting in 2022 as well.
This means we could see the RTX 40-series arrive with high MSRP's right off the bat, and those high prices could last for the entire generation. Of course, this will be on top of the already ongoing shortage which will inflate the prices of these GPUs even more, especially if Nvidia plans to release the RTX 40-series in 2022.
Intel will likely be the least affected of the three companies from these changes. However, Intel is still reported to hike pricing due to multiple reasons. The first is related to its chips already outsourced directly to TSMC. Since TSMC is increasing its quotes by a large margin, we can expect Intel to push higher prices onto the consumer.
It is also reported that Intel is proceeding with in-house development of advanced manufacturing nodes and construction of new fabs, which will give Intel more incentive to drive costs higher to recuperate the additional investments.
Due to all of this, DigiTimes believes 2022 could be a very bad year for the PC industry as a whole. It is believed PC demand will likely slow down quarter by quarter during the year, but at the same time, prices for critical components like CPUs and GPUs will continue to increase. This is thanks to both rising fab costs as well as other factors such as high shipping costs and worsening inflation -- not to mention the silicon shortage.
