In addition to the price reduction of products such as memory and flash memory due to the bear market factors of the industry, many PC products are increasing in price this year, such as the core processors, graphics cards and motherboards. Not long ago, we published an article introducing foreigners complaining about the wrong direction of graphics cards. It has become a ghostly and big article, and now some people are targeting the CPU again.
The Japanese website PCWatch published an article a few days ago, talking about the problem of the gradual disappearance of low-cost CPUs. They refer to CPUs within 100 US dollars, that is, within 700 yuan in China. This part is the choice of many entry-level CPUs In the past, this was Pentium and Celeron, and AMD Athlon’s main battleground.
An important reason why there are fewer and fewer low-end CPUs is the advanced technology——You read that right, the more advanced the technology, the harder it will be for manufacturers to launch low-end CPUs in the future, because it is not cost-effective.
The original article has made 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 by Intel), and the yield rate is 80%.The chip cost of 100 square millimeters is 42.6 US dollars,If the chip area continues to increase, up to 300 square millimeters, the cost is $210.5.
Even with the smallest core area, the cost of a CPU wafer would be US$42.6 In addition to other steps and the reserved space in commercial circulation, it is becoming increasingly difficult to produce chips that cost less than 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 low-end CPUs.
This issue is not only true for Intel, AMD is also unable to escape, and it is difficult to guarantee the cost of low-end CPUs using the TSMC foundry.
