Let’s go shopping!
Or not...
It’s a very rare and special time in the world of the PC. We’re witnessing above-average generational performance leaps with GPUs, a remarkable battle for the CPU space well into its third year, exciting new PCIe 4 SSDs, motherboards with loads of lanes, monitors with extreme specs, and RAM hitting ridiculous speeds. It’s wonderful. Well, it could be wonderful. But it’s not. Because you just can’t buy a lot of this stuff without a long wait, and/or some compromise on what you really wanted.
You know the situation. You may well be on a waiting list for something. Odds are, you are. We’ve covered this from a few angles this month. Joel (page 17), Jared (page 19) and Mark (page 64) look at the issue, the immediate effects and the complex web of reasons why it’s happening, and the likely outcomes. We still can’t say when things will improve, though.
As you may have heard, it’s an issue affecting the world beyond the PC. Car manufacturers are seeing shortages of essential chips for vehicles, and Tesla recently shut down one of its production plants for two weeks very likely due to chip shortages (though that wasn’t Tesla’s official reason). And you can bet it’s also affecting military production, and many other major industries. U.S. President Biden was convinced enough of the urgency to resolve this that he’s appointed a task force to look at long-term solutions.
While there are many interlinked root causes, for our PC corner of the world a very serious concern is that a huge proportion of the world’s chips come from a single company – TSMC in Taiwan. If you’ve ever wondered why the U.S. isn’t keen on removing itself from the defence pact it has with Taiwan... well, this is part of it – though this has really only fallen into focus recently.
Besides operating several fabrication plants for many different spec ICs (differentiated mostly by process size, ie. the nanometers (‘nm’) we’re always talking about), TSMC has the world’s only 7nm plant – and that’s where the choke point lies for a big chunk of PC gear. AMD of course uses TSMC exclusively for its 7nm PC CPUs and GPUS – but the same is true of the AMD CPU and GPU that goes into every single PlayStation 5 and Xbox S and X. And it’s widely known, off the record of course, that both Sony and Microsoft have minimum order agreements which AMD is obliged to fulfil over its own Ryzen and Radeon products. Nvidia is in the same situation with its 30-series cards and chip partner Samsung. Too much demand, too little capacity.
TSMC is close to finalising plans for a huge 7nm fab in the U.S. But it will be years before that’s online. In the meantime we’ll continue to point at COVID, crypto miners and scalpers as to why we can’t buy the gear we want, but it’s a complex web that will stay tangled for many months or even years to come.
BEN MANSILL