In addition to the price reduction of products such as memory and flash memory due to the market bear market, many PC products are increasing in price this year, such as the core processors, graphics cards and motherboards.A few days ago, a foreign media complained that the direction of the display card was wrong, and it became expensive and large. Now someone is targeting the CPU again.
The Japanese media published an article a few days ago, mentioning the problem of the gradual disappearance of low-cost CPUs, which refers to CPUs within $100. This part is the choice of many entry-level CPUs. In the past, it was the main battlefield of Intel Pentium, Celeron and AMD Athlon.
An important reason for fewer and fewer entry-level CPUs is the advanced manufacturing process. You read that right, the more advanced the manufacturing process, the more difficult it will be for manufacturers to launch entry-level CPUs in the future, because it is not cost-effective.
The Japanese media did calculations. Based on the current 5nm process wafer processing price of 20,000 US dollars (it is 13,000 US dollars but has a premium of 6,500 US dollars from Intel), the yield rate is 80%, and the cost of a 100 square millimeter wafer is 42.6 US dollars, if the chip area continues to increase, up to 300 square millimeters, then the cost is 210.5 US dollars.
Even with the smallest core area, the cost of a CPU wafer would be US$42.6. In addition to the reserved space for other steps and commercial circulation, it is becoming more and more difficult to manufacture a chip within US$100. In the future, the manufacturing process will continue to be upgraded, and each replacement will greatly increase the cost. One can imagine the situation of entry-level CPUs.
This situation is not only true for Intel, but also for AMD. It is also difficult to guarantee the cost of entry-level CPUs with TSMC.
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