Today’s bit of bad news, if true, has been a long time coming, with DigiTimes ($) reporting the biggest semiconductor wafer fabrication player, TSCM, is flagging a price hike in 2022 of up to 20%:
- “TSMC has notified clients of an about 10% price hike for its sub-16nm process manufacturing, with the new prices set to be effective starting 2022, according to sources at IC design houses.”
- It would be the company’s steepest single increase, and no doubt represents material price increases and supply chain squeezing of margins.
- TSMC also confirmed a delay to its next-gen 3nm manufacturing this week.
- TSMC doesn’t disclose its pricing, though the DigiTimes report suggests that the company seeks to bump up a 28nm wafer to “nearly $3000” starting in Jan 2022.
- By comparison, and noting this is based on guesstimates by retired engineers, there’s also a rumor 5nm wafers are priced at something like $17,000.
- You can try a silicon cost calculator here, though you’d have to consider it accurate-ish at best (Adapteva).
Uh-oh:
- If accurate, and applied wholesale to all clients, that would obviously include chips like Apple’s A-series and M-series, Qualcomm, Intel, and AMD.
- Meaning, of course, CPUs, GPUs, SoCs, and the like will cost more, reducing margins for manufacturers, and/or being passed to us, the consumers, on smartphones, iPhones, PCs, and so on.
- It’s all down to things like shipping rates going through the roof to an 11-year high, steel prices rising, shortages — and the problem is that what would seem to be a short-term problem rolls on (Bloomberg).
- Phil Levy, the chief economist at Flexport, told The New York Times: “I’m less in that ‘transitory’ camp and more in the ‘we have reason to be concerned’ camp.”
- Other shortage rumors include launch dates for new smartphones slipping a few weeks from planned dates.
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It’s been 30 years since a 21-year-old Linus Torvalds sent a message to newsgroup comp.os.minix, starting the creation of Linux.
Here’s someone’s autographed printout:
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