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TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

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41–50 of 620 posts

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#41
post #5

I was told the inflation was temporary. This doesn’t sound temporary!

Inflation is a rate of change, not an absolute change. When people say inflation is transitory, they mean that the rate of change is transitory (prices will stop going up). But the inflation that has occurred will not go away. You will not pay less when the inflation subsides. You will merely stop paying more.

This is what happens when you print $5T and refuse to let the economy go through any sort of healthy contraction.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#42

My PC is 11 years old this year. I've been waiting to upgrade it for 2 years but held off because GPU prices are utterly ridiculous. I don't know who can afford these inflated prices, I was hoping things would settle but it doesn't appear to be the case.

Why not just purchase a used one on eBay?

Prices for used GPUs are also inflated, though I think they have started to come down a bit. Once Ethereum moves to proof-of-stake (early 2022?) the market will probably get flooded with used GPUs.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#43

My PC is 11 years old this year. I've been waiting to upgrade it for 2 years but held off because GPU prices are utterly ridiculous. I don't know who can afford these inflated prices, I was hoping things would settle but it doesn't appear to be the case.

Try finding a PC starter bundle that includes a gpu from GameStop or some other retailer and you can find one for MSRP. The trade off is you’re buying other PC parts you may not need, for example a PSU.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#44

Goodbye dreams of owning an Nvidia GPU in 2022 - I ain't paying cutthroat prices on ebay/amazon. Guess we're buying Intel! Sidenote: Intel manufacturers their own stuff, and so is Apple right? Their new cool chips are all in-house or are they through TSMC?

Apple's ARM chips are 100% TSMC manufactured. While Intel makes its own CPUs in house, some of Intel's forthcoming GPUs (Arc?) are from TSMC, too.

https://www.techgadgetguides.com/news/apple-partner-tsmc-wan...

https://www.pcgamer.com/intel-alchemist-gpu-tsmc-6nm-process...

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#45
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in need of an upgrade but having a harder and harder time justifying the expense for what is a hobby. I guess eventually my system will be old enough that I will be better off just ordering a prebuilt, where I'll get gouged a bit overall but not by some insane amount just for a GPU

Price of pre-built will reflect the price for components. So if the GPU price increases, so will the pre-built price.

Then again, a corporation is likely able to contract with another corporation in a way that's not disturbed by scalpers?

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#46
post #28

Supply shortages are the excuse du jour, but so long as TSMC has the kingmaking node I expect it to become expensive. Very expensive. Expensive enough to move margin from the king their node made right back to TSMC.

As it should be. Without competition, and with demand outstripping supply, TSMC is free to find the price the market will bear.

In the short term, sure, I'll buy that. In the long term, monopoly or near monopoly of any sort will turn toxic.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#47

Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…

I love how crypto has become easy-to-blame, when in fact datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed to the brim with chips for ML workloads. It's important to recognize when consumers are being squeezed by multiple market forces.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#48

Supply shortages are the excuse du jour, but so long as TSMC has the kingmaking node I expect it to become expensive. Very expensive. Expensive enough to move margin from the king their node made right back to TSMC.

This isn’t a price hike on their best node this is a price hike in their more mainstream nodes which have real competition.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just purchase a used one on eBay?

My current GPU is a used 980, it's mostly ok but it makes noises when doing certain tasks for some reason (like scrolling a browser window), I'm really not sure what causes it but it's put me off buying second hand cards, if it fails there's not much you can do to fix it

It’s just coil whine, not really worth worrying about. Happens on many graphics cards even when brand new.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#50
post #33
post #7

Starting to get the feeling that the current prices for PC components are here to say.

This might be the start of the end of high-end PC gaming, unless prices get back to a more reasonable level. Consoles (and phones) are very competitive and cost significantly less. Or perhaps it just causes the games to have lower performance requirements. Is integrated graphics the future of PC gaming?

I think it's interesting that we have three options now for sidestepping this by streaming games and yet none of them have made much of a dent.

Microsoft seems to have the best business model but you're stuck streaming the games on Game Pass, and their latency seems to be the worst in my experience.

Stadia seems to have the best tech in terms of latency, but the weird "it'll only work on these certain Chromecasts" launch situation put me off it for a bit, and then there's the business model - trusting Google to honor purchases on this service in perpetuity.

Luna is the one I haven't tried but seems to be going for an approach where they partner with publishers to sell catalog packs, even if they're not quite there yet.

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