If you've been in the market recently for a new graphics card, chances are you either couldn't get your hands on one or, if so, you paid an absurd price for it. .
Ever since Nvidia and AMD released their latest generations of GPUs, graphics cards have been absurdly expensive and incredibly hard to find due to a global shortage of silicon.
But now that Intel is preparing to enter the discrete graphics card market with its Arc Alchemist GPUs, it's easy to be optimistic about the shape of the GPU market later this year. I have bad news for you, however, it won't be that easy.
While these new GPUs will surely ease some of the pressure we're feeling, and might even push prices down a bit, Intel will fall victim to the same limiting forces as AMD and Nvidia.
all about manufacturing
One of the main reasons the silicon shortage has hit the computing world so hard is that AMD, Nvidia, and Intel all rely, at least to some extent, on a single company: TSMC, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
And because all these companies trust TSMC, all the promises we've heard about GPU shortages will be over soon, a bit short when you realize TSMC came out in April 2021 and warned that chip shortages could continue until 2022 in this report from The Verge.
While it's definitely a shame for AMD, we've also heard that Intel will be using the TSMC 6nm manufacturing process to produce the chips for its first-gen Arc Alchemist graphics cards, according to PCGamer.
So while Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger may have taken to Twitter to assure gamers that Intel will try to release millions of graphics cards every year to meet unprecedented demand, it's hard not to wonder how Team Blue will do it.
New foundries will take time
The lack of foundries to build new chips is only part of the problem keeping more gamers from getting their hands on new graphics cards, but it's probably the most pressing. The obvious solution would be to build new foundries, but that is easier said than done.
TSMC has worked with the US government to start building a new chip smelter in Arizona in 2020, through TechCrunch, but while that was a few years ago, the factory isn't expected to start producing chips until 2024, another two years. from now on.
Intel is also working on opening new foundries, but Team Blue facilities will likely face a similar setup time. All of these new installations are very long-term solutions, forcing us to seek immediate relief. Immediate relief that probably won't come.
Executives from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have assured us that these companies are working day and night to offer more graphics cards, but the problem is much bigger than any one of them.
The terrible thing is that anyone who wants a graphics card that doesn't break the bank will probably have to wait at least another year. It's even more painful to listen to at the start of a new generation of consoles, when games traditionally get a little harder to run on older hardware.
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