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Back in November, we heard that SUMCO, one of the largest silicon wafer producers in the world, was planning to increase prices by 20 percent this year, with another price increase planned in 2019. Now, it looks like other Silicon wafer manufacturers are joining in, with Taiwan's GlobalWafers confirming that prices will increase by 20 percent throughout this year.
SUMCO is a Japanese based company and is responsible for over 60 percent of the world's silicon wafer supply. With a 20 percent price increase, CPU, GPU, DRAM and Flash makers may have taken their business elsewhere, but it looks like they won't necessarily have that opportunity. This week, GlobalWafers Chairwoman, Doris Hsu, informed shareholders that the company would raise prices for silicon wafers by 20 percent this year.
Apparently, the biggest reason for this price increase is a shortage in 12-inch, 300mm wafers, which are traditionally used to build processors, graphics chips and RAM. Given that GPU prices have already risen to ridiculous heights due to crypto-mining, this is an additional blow to DIY PC builders.
Last year when SUMCO revealed its own price hikes, the company estimated that global wafer demands will rise to 6.6 million per month by 2020. Hopefully by then, we'll see production increase but for the time being, it looks like we will be stuck with price hikes as demand outstrips supply.
KitGuru Says: This is terrible news all around really. Building a PC got prohibitively expensive over the course of 2017 and now, it is starting to look like things won't get much easier this year. It is getting more and more difficult to be a tech enthusiast.
Yep it sucks to be a PC builder right now and it looks like it will only get worse. I guess we now have the companies that are right at the heart of it all going hey me too we want to rake in more of that cash as well.
The year the PC really die……
real question would be: what doesnt get price increase these days?
I know for sure that my income doesn’t get any increase…
This is ridiculous maybe I need to upgrade asap, I can’t be for another 10 years with the phenom II x6 I have 😛 I have already settled that I will be with my radeon 7850 for another 5 years 🙁
SSD’s seem to be going back down in price
Cos the f’kin fabs are using them all up to make mining ASICs and stuff, as well as the stupid number of different phone model CPUs and memory chips and all that.
The amount of energy consumed in bitcoin mining is just completely absurd. Apparently it’s causing energy shortages in some places. PoW is not the future of crypto, it’ll be the downfall of it! PoS on the other hand, little energy required, no specific hardware costs… shame PoS won’t happen because of all the places/companies/groups so heavily invested in PoW will just say no and nobody can do anything about it because of it’s decentralized nature.
You don’t need to upgrade, you want to upgrade, big difference. Hopefully, not more than 1 – 3 years, don’t exaggerate.
What the hell…
Is this not price collusion?
Silicon Wafer price hikes will only accelerate the impeding replacement technologies of Graphene and it’s forbears. They know it and that’s the secret for the increase: one last big haul before their supplies will no longer be coveted.
No, it’s the world’s largest supplier of raw wafers increasing prices and competitors doing the same in response.
The pressures for this have been growing for quite a while, though, so I don’t think there’s anything really underhanded going on here aside from demand growing faster than the growth in supply/capacity.
I wish people would crunch the numbers.
The current extreme GPU shortage on the Nvidia side has NOTHING to do with cryptominiers, it is due to Nvidia having TSMC shift production out of the current Pascal GPUs to the upcomming Volta GPUs coupled with unexpectedly high demand ESPECIALLY ON HIGHER END SYSTEMS during the normal “big 4Q Christmas Sales Season”.
Nvidia-related cryptocoins have shown flat to DECREASING hashrate during that period, indicating NO new rigs getting added and some old rigs getting shut down.,
*AMD* shortages might be getting significant impact from Ethereum though as it’s shown a lot of hashrate growth during 4Q 2017 and since.
Also, 2017 was the first year in 6 years that saw an INCREASE in “traditional PC sales” year-over-year during the 4Q – don’t write the PC off yet.
Ever heard of component failure and degradation? An actual need to upgrade might be around the corner for a 10 year old system.
No, just your wallet.
Mining ASICs are hardly at fault. They’re produced in such relatively small quantities they don’t even matter in this context. Mining in general is hardly at fault as well. Take a look at phones and the explosive trend in embedded electronic systems (cars, fridges, TVs, etc.). Cloud computing is also a pretty big player. Blaming it on cryptomining just shows that there are a lot of other factors you haven’t taken into consideration. I know it has become a trend to blame cryptomining, but do yourself a favor and rise above that mentality.
by design, they have a wafer shortage because they are not producing wafers, but they have the means, they created the wafer shortage
the sub $170 AMD Ryzen CPUs are looking better and better
He still says that he “needs” to upgrade, solely because he wants higher-end hardware, so his stuff is fine for the time being not accounting degradation. It still falls into “want.”
I guess this is one way to push more and more people to consoles.
Is this not price collusion?
SSD’s seem to be going back down in price
Actually the Ryzen 3 APU for 100$ looks charming.
Looks like the communists are going to squeeze play the market.
I don’t need to upgrade? Well tell this to my deadlines and my software that gets heavier in every update.
So price fixing then? Isn’t that illegal?
No, that would be capitalists.
you just assume that I want and not need. If I wanted I could have upgraded years ago, I just didn’t need it then because the path to upgrade was not worth it (bulldozer was crap, next was a little bit less crap).
Now with that old cpu getting dropped behind because of newer instruction sets that it can’t run natively and need to emulate the impact is even greater.
Never stopped anyone before for very long. Pay a low fine and do it again.
So we have super-overpriced GPUs and RAM, and now CPUs are going to join them and GPUs, RAM and SSDs will get even more expensive. That’s just fabulous, isn’t it?
Pebbles, maybe?
amd hold the biggest advantage their dies yield is too great
I’m a miner there was a bubble ending last week starting weeks before that. One 1070 was getting $12 per day at peak. I added several gpus to the fold during that time, all of my Miner Buddy’s did the exact same thing. Every time I add a GPU it’s because the rest of the pack made enough to buy the next round. last month’s bubble was enough for 6 1070s to make enough cryptocurrency to buy two more 1070s. mining has most definitely cause the strain on supplies and I don’t blame anyone for doing it because it’s free money.
(btw this comment is for MegamaN… I just clicked on “Reply” under Nikolas’ comment since I was lazy to scroll up…)
This is weird… I don’t remember any rule saying that one cannot want and need at the same time…
I need to upgrade, but I don’t want to upgrade just yet…
I want to upgrade, even though I don’t need to upgrade…
I need to upgrade, and I want to do it now (or in the near future) ←←← see, I don’t see any problem with “need” and “want” in the same sentence.
i font think so, don’t forget that as we move way from hdds and have more and more nand/flash, we need more and more silicon wafers, so prices increase, something that could happen though is more companies might enter the market as higher prices means that its easier for places with higher costs to enter the market
Where does it actually say GlobalWafers is increasing their price by 20%, Kitguru? The DigiTimes article (https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20180202PD200.html) mentions shortages and plans to ramp up production in Ms. Hsu’s quotes. No mention of their company also ramping up price.
Sure, you don’t see a problem but I do, pretty much went nowhere.
But I respect your decision.
There is always Intel, and I like using my FX-6300, does great at all I need. Plus, FX-8350 does 2 more threads, could help temporarily for the past 4 years.
Of course Ry Zen is a big upgrade, but the dreaded R.A.M. prices.
The HD 7850 is still okay-ish.
Whatever software you are using is also questionable so I can’t answer if I don’t know, nor care to know. No software alternatives that still give your Phenom processor a chance to breathe?
Other than Ethereum, total network hashrates have been FLAT though for months, with very SMALL bobbles.
DO explain where enough Nvidia cards are going to miners to cause this shortage when they are NOT getting added to the hashrate?
The CORE of the issue, as is starting to get REPORTED, is that Nvidia had TSMC shift production from the current Pascal GPUs to their next-generation Volta GPUs – per TSMC “around the end of the year” – then they got hit by unexpectedly high demand IN TOTAL fairly shortly after they made that decision.
ASICs do add up to a currently very crowded market for wafers.
Adoption rate of current technologies make the shortage in wafer supply,
it’s not just 1 single aspect.
I can’t even find the difficulty for most the new coins so I don’t think anyone can accurately say that.
SSD price have stayed more or less flat since 2014.
graphene is a long way off, don’t count on graphene chips in the next few years, we will be stuck with CMOS but transistors continue to shrink, 3nm is totally possible, big 800 mm^2 GPUs are going to cost 2000$ or more but performance will go up 2-fold every 2 years for the next 6 years
intelligent people won’t let greedy companies take too much, just buy a minimum or don’t buy at all, wait
Sure there is intel, this is why I had the second system in the office with an i3 till this year that I upgraded it, to an AM4 platform (with an athlon x4 950 as a placeholder for a ryzen APU later on), but my system was already a heavily invested one, and have an asus sabretooth AM3+ on it, so it was a no go from a cost prospective, and anyway this system was outperforming the other one anyway so I decided to wait till amd get their shit together or move to a completely new platform.
As for the software, I’m a graphic designer and I’m almost forced to use the adobe crap, they are industry standard those days and they are so big and fat corporate giant that their software that I use (photoshop, illustrator, indesign) is a buggy mess that hardly care if you have more than 2 cpu cores (yeap in the year 2018).
I moved some workflow in serif affinity photo and designer and this is the reason that I still have the phenom (those programs use 50% of the 6 core at worst case scenario, this is the best case for adobe ones)
This gave my cpu some more life but really, this is the end of line. I am at 8GB of RAM and already feel that it is barely enough (or it is not if I have to run a couple of my programs side by side and have a browser on), but with the memory prices I hesitate to add more ram (ddr3).
So the plan is (or was, let’s see the prices) to upgrade first the small system with the i3 (almost done, just waiting for the ryzen APUs to hit the market) and then later in 2018 (or maybe early 2019) to go ahead and change cpu/mobo/ram on my phenom system.
The thing is, everything is getting more expensive while my income is stagnant at best (and really, everyone’s else too, my clients they don’t make more money, so they don’t spent in my business more money), so if I could barely manage this update with the current prices in mind, even a small price increase in each component will blow the plan for sure.
If this 20% translate into direct cost increase to the end user (it could be nice if manufacturers could take some cost on them, but it is most likely they will push it down the line, or even increase it) then we are talking for a significant burden for the end user, it will be a disaster 🙁
New coins have such a low network hashrate they don’t matter – some long-time coins like DGB are so low on hashrate my small farm was at times 2-3 PERCENT of the total network – with 20 cards or so at the time.
Coinwarez is a good place to start, they cover almost every coin with hashrate and price charts.
True, it’s not just the ASICs for mining etc, though that is placing a somewhat unnecessary extra strain on already short resources.
When there’s more different things being made, that’s when it gets expensive.
Why GDDR5/5X/6 and HBM2, why not just GDDR6 and HBM2?
Intel don’t make separate designs for every i7/i5/i3/Pentium/Celeron/Xeon etc there is. They make a few common designs, and disable some parts depending on yield and quality of the silicon, aka binning.
Look at AMD, they’ve literally got 1 die that they make. They can link them together (threadripper/epyc), and they can cut them down (ryzen 3/5 etc). And look how cheap they’re able to offer their CPUs.
If others followed suit, they could easily lower the cost of manufacture, lower the cost of production & design (fewer different SKUs to design around etc), and the end point being lower prices to customers.
You’re talking about Multi-Chip Modules vs Monolithic chips. The reason the industry is just beginning to delve into that territory, is because of technological constraints and barriers we first had to overcome (and still have to). Believe it or not, but MCM architecure has been on the drawing board for ages, AMD just found a pragmatic (but still somewhat flawed) way to do it. Nvidia and Intel isn’t far behind according to rumors from their R&D departments.