winjer
Gold Member
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TSMC 3nm Wafer Pricing Revealed: $20,000 US & 25% Price Increase Over 5nm, Next-Gen CPUs & GPUs To Be More Expensive
According to a report by DigiTimes, it looks like TSMC's 3nm wafers are going to be super expensive & will affect next-gen CPU & GPU prices.
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An important thing to note is that N7 waffer was priced at 6500$ just 2 years ago. But TSMC decided to jack up prices, because of high demand.
But now that demand has fallen off a cliff, they insist on keeping the same price, just because of pure greed.
And of course, the prices for other process nodes were increased as well. So we have an increase in prices because these nodes are harder to develop, but were exacerbated because of plain old greed.
The report states that due to its dominance in the chip manufacturing field and no competition yet in the 3nm process segment, TSMC is going to raise the prices of its 3nm wafers significantly. TSMC wafer pricing is depicted in a chart that shows the jump from 7nm ($10,000 US) to 5nm ($16,000) wafers to be around 60%. Now with 3nm, TSMC's wafer costs are expected to surpass the $20,000 US figure which would mean that we are bound to get more expensive products in the form of next generation CPUs and GPUs.
Currently, AMD and NVIDIA are some of the prime customers of TSMC alongside Apple and others. NVIDIA has definitely bumped up the prices of their cards per segment. The RTX 4090 costs 10-15% more than the RTX 3090 and the RTX 4080 costs over 50% higher than the RTX 3080. NVIDIA's CEO was also reported to visit Taiwan to talk with TSMC's CEO about securing 3nm wafers early on for their next-gen GPU lineup.
AMD has been able to offset the price by mixing and matching different nodes on its chiplet products. The Ryzen, Radeon, and EPYC lineup utilize both 5nm and 6nm technologies and chiplets to help cut-down overall costs associated with monolithic dies. Moving forward, Intel is also going to leverage TSMC N5 and N3 process nodes for its Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake tGPU IPs.
But this dependency on TSMC means that the semiconductor manufacturing company will remain in a dominant position and can justify the higher prices for its technological edge over others. Rival Samsung had also stated that they were going to begin mass production of their own 3nm (GAP) node by 2024 however things aren't looking great as the yields are less than 20% & there are many issues with Samsung's next-gen node at the moment. All of this means is that chip prices are going to continue to go higher in terms of costs and unless there's another competitor on the same level as TSMC, we can't expect this trend to break.