More Silicon! AMD’s Lisa Su expects the world’s chip shortage to ease in 2022

The global semiconductor shortage should ease in mid-2022  

In a recent interview with CNBC, AMD’s CEO, Lisa Su, discussed the world’s ongoing semiconductor shortage, discussing how long it should take for the world’s manufacturers to keep up with demand and for today’s supply issues to ease. 

The semiconductor market started to experience shortages in 2019, and things only got worse in 2020 and 2021, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic has made the world more reliant on the semiconductor industry. 

According to Lisa Su, manufacturing plants that were planned last year should start producing chips in the coming months, which will help alleviate the world’s shortage of microchips and other components. That said, supply is expected to remain tight until mid-2022. 

Sadly, this means that manufacturers will continue to experience shortages for the remainder of 2021. This problem has prevented AMD to supply enough of its products to keep up with demand. AMD’s competitors, Intel and Nvidia, are also facing similar supply issues. 

The world’s chip shortage is expected to ease in mid-2022 as more and more manufacturing capacity comes online. While this is good news, it is not the news that PC builders and gamers will want to hear. It sounds like it will take at least eight months for today’s shortages to ease. This timeframe means that today’s high GPU pricing could be a factor until mid-2022, which is not good news for the PC market. 

While most hardware enthusiasts will not be happy with Lisa Su’s outlook for the semiconductor industry, it is good to hear that things should be better in the latter half of 2022. 

  

As reported by The Verge, AMD’s Lisa Su has downplayed AMD’s role within the cryptocurrency market, stating the crypto market is a “pretty volatile space” and a market that AMD is not focusing on at this time. 

While Nvidia has attempted to nerf the cryptomining performance of its RTX GPUs with LHR (Lite Hash Rate) products, AMD has failed to deliver a similar solution. That said, Nvidia’s LHR series GPU mining limitations have been bypassed by miners (either partially or fully), and Nvidia has developed dedicated cryptocurrency mining hardware to cryptocurrency miners to utilise.

AMD’s latest RDNA 2 graphics cards are relatively poor at cryptocurrency mining when compared to their Nvidia-based counterparts. For starters, AMD’s RDNA 2-based graphics cards utilise a hardware feature called “infinity cache”, designed to increase their graphics cards’ memory bandwidth under gaming workloads. This feature is practically useless for cryptocurrency miners, as AMD’s infinity cache is too small for cryptocurrency mining use cases. To make a long story short, AMD doesn’t need an LHR series to deter cryptocurrency miners, as their gaming-focused RDNA 2 features already do that. Had AMD designed their GPUs around larger memory buses and removed their Infinity Cache, AMD’s GPUs would be stronger cryptocurrency miners. 

By the end of 2022, the semiconductor market will return to a level of normalisation, which should hopefully mean that more GPUs will be available on store shelves and that consumer pricing for graphics cards and other products will return to normal. That said, there is always a chance that the chip shortage could continue until 2023, should semiconductor demand grow at a faster than expected rate. 

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