AMD, Intel and NVIDIA: the prices of our processors and graphics cards are not about to drop

Written by Guillaume
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Major players promise better availability, but at what price?

For more than a year, the graphics card market has been completely turned upside down. Availability is ridiculously low, far lower than a particularly high demand. As a direct consequence, prices have skyrocketed and when it is possible to get your hands on a graphics card, it is usually at a price two or three times higher than the rate recommended by the manufacturers. AMD has completely given up selling cards under its own name and only NVIDIA still sells some (too rare) cards at the official price. On the processor side, things are less complex and even if there have been ups and downs, the latest models are globally available, at less surreal prices.

Last September, Lisa Su - AMD's boss - reassured us that the supply of graphics cards should improve from the second half of 2022. As if to reinforce the point, a few months later, NVIDIA came up with a reassuring statement. Colette Kross, the group's financial director, said at the beginning of the year that the production of graphics chips - and therefore cards - had continued to increase in 2021 and that the trend should continue in 2022 so that the situation would be less tense for consumers from July 2022.

The problem is that this increase in production is not expected to be sufficient to absorb the enormous demand, and it also requires major investments. Investments that the main foundries - Intel, TSMC or Samsung in particular - have made, but which will only produce their effects in a few times. In the meantime, a company like TSMC has decided to raise its prices and the next generations of CPU / GPU should be more particularly affected.

Thus, the Taiwanese company has decided to increase its prices on its latest etching processes, the 5 nm and 7 nm, which are highly anticipated by the main players in the semiconductor industry. We speak ofan increase in quotations at TSMC of about 10 to 20% which will necessarily have an impact on some current products, but especially on the next generations. We are thinking in particular of AMD's Ryzen 6000 and 7000, Intel's ARC Alchemist graphics processors or NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4000.