The ongoing semiconductor shortage wreaked havoc on the pricing of PC components like CPUs and GPUs in 2021, and it appears that 2022 might be even worse.
According to 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 like AMD, Intel, and Nvidia will also increase their product prices in the near future.
For AMD, the price hike will likely come across its entire range of processors, including the 7nm based Zen 2 (Ryzen 3000) and Zen 3 (Ryzen 5000) processors, as well as their upcoming 5nm based Ryzen 7000 processors. The RDNA 2 based AMD GPUs are also expected to be more expensive in the future as they also depend on TSMC’s 7nm process.
Talking 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 costlier since it has switched nodes from Samsung to TSMC’s 5nm for their next-gen GPUs. DigiTimes also reports that Nvidia has already made prepayments to TSMC for long-term orders of 5nm silicon for the RTX 4000 series GPUs starting in 2022 as well.
Moving on 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. However, the report states that Intel will also be hiking its pricing for multiple reasons, including the increased 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 will give Intel more incentive to drive costs higher to recuperate the additional investments.
All in all, the report indicated that 2022 could potentially be a terrible year for the PC industry as well as the customers who have been facing excruciatingly high prices for more than a year now. So if you are planning to build/buy a PC or upgrade components on your existing system, we suggest you do so quickly before the price hikes are implemented.
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