Originally thought that after the magical 2020, the situation of semiconductor shortages will be alleviated, in fact, we have predicted that the entire semiconductor industry will be out of stock, and hope to be able to solve in 2021, but 2021 really taught us a lesson.
The new crown continues to ravage the world in 2021, foreign logistics and transportation is in a state of paralysis, while the semiconductor field is in a state based on 24 hours of full load, accompanied by the shortage of chips, out of stock and high premium has become the biggest keyword in the DIY market in 2021, so the side effect is consumer distrust of terminal manufacturers, 2021 is obviously not a good year for consumers. However, the DIY industry must continue to develop, 2022 should be the year of hardware platform replacement, in addition, with the decline in virtual currency prices, miners' interest in graphics cards and other products is no longer strong, and hardware supply has gradually been on the right track, at least in 2022 we see the hope of sufficient supply.
CPU: Tiger head is more tiger tail
The CPU market was quite restful throughout last year, and the two giants can be said to be in a completely different situation for 2021. For AMD, the Ryzen™ 5000 series processors launched in the second half of 2020 are already good enough for AMD to survive 2021 without launching new products. For Intel, 2021 is a situation of first suppressing and then rising. Its own 10th generation Core processor is unable to withstand the AMD Ryzen™ 5000 processor, so it hastily launched the 11th generation Core processor as an emergency plan. However, although the 11th generation Core processor has a relatively large improvement in its single-threaded and game performance, but subject to the 14nm process, the 11th generation Core processor is very disappointing in terms of power consumption and heat, which can be said to be one of the most failed processors in Intel in recent years. It seems that the emergence of 11th generation Core processors has also continued the tradition of Intel odd-generation processors. Fortunately, as a CPU giant, Intel finally decisively abandoned the 11th generation Core processor in the second half of the year and launched the much-anticipated 12th generation Core processor, which adopted a hybrid architecture and Intel 7 process to make the Core processor reborn, and finally had a point of competition with AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors.
In 2022, these two semiconductor companies will also start a new wave of white-knife warfare, intel and AMD have played the first card of mobile platforms on CES, of which Intel launched a 12th-generation Core mobile processor, and AMD is the launch of Ryzen 6000 series processors, the first round of encounters will also be accompanied by the large-scale distribution of notebook terminals. In the second half of this year, it will be the war of desktop processors, in which Intel will launch 13th generation Core processors, increasing the number of E cores while increasing the cache of L3 and L2, in order to achieve better results in game performance. In addition, the cooperation between the P core and the E core will be more tacit. After a year of polishing, the 13th generation Core processor is obviously better than the 12th generation Core processor. I don't know if Intel can break the tradition of odd processor pit daddy.
As for AMD, it will launch a Zen 4 architecture processor in the second half of this year, based on TSMC's latest 5nm process technology, and has a huge improvement in the process architecture, in addition, the Ryzen 7000 processor based on the Zen 4 architecture will also increase support for DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0 channels, which will be on an equal footing with Intel's 12th and 13th generation Core processors. However, with the release of the Ryzen™ 7000 series processors, AMD's interface has also evolved from AM4 to AM5, so that the motherboard and memory will be updated with the AMD processor for a round of major changes.
Graphics: A new generation of graphics cards is coming, just for normal supply
If the CPU market is more abundant because Intel has its own fab production plant, the graphics card market in 2021 is completely a seller's market, in other words, a chicken feather. In 2021, the virtual currency market has ushered in a new wave of speculation, including bitcoin, Ethereum and other mainstream virtual currencies have repeatedly reached new highs, of which bitcoin reached a price of $60,000 in March last year, even more expensive than a Tesla Model 3. And such crazy behavior naturally allows countless mine bosses to join the sweep of the graphics card, as long as it is a graphics card that does not lose money in mining, it is basically swept away, and the players can only watch the major e-commerce platforms prompt "out of stock", or accept a rather outrageous premium.
And to what extent is the premium for graphics cards? There are also relevant statistics in the market, statistics show that in the first half of this year, the highest graphics card premium even reached 3 times as much, and the premium of 50%-100% is not uncommon, a 3000 yuan level graphics card, need a premium of about 1000 yuan to buy, basically is a fierce slaughter of consumers. Even these mine bosses are still dead, the desktop graphics card is not enough is to start playing the attention of the notebook, only the notebook installed 30 series of graphics cards, then the same by these mine bosses to purchase, resulting in gamers can not even buy the game book. Because of such a hot graphics card market, whether it is NVIDIA, AMD and other upstream manufacturers or graphics card manufacturers, 2021 can be described as a lot of money, the updated graphics card models on the market are also very few, the more famous is RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti these two graphics cards, and AMD launched radeon RX 6600 XT graphics card during ChinaJoy, of course, these graphics cards are also sought after by players once launched. The same is the rhythm of selling out.
Just because the graphics card is in a serious state of short supply, many players have turned to the game console market, and in 2021, including Sony PS5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X successfully achieved nationalization, so some players' game needs have been met by game consoles, while another part of the consumers see the premium of extremely serious graphics cards, choose to lie flat, directly abandon this generation of graphics cards, anyway, 2022 will be a new graphics card, then buy a new graphics card on the line. Finally, with the virtual currency boom gradually fading, and the world is supervising the virtual currency, at the end of 2021, the virtual currency has a sharp dive, compared with the highest point almost waist, so the mine owners have also begun to have little interest in mining software such as graphics cards, and finally there are graphics cards on the e-commerce platform, although the price is still 15-20%, but at least it has been able to make urgent players accept.
In 2022, the first wish of players is that the supply of graphics cards is guaranteed, and the new generation of graphics cards is powerful enough in performance. The news now is that Nvidia and AMD will launch a new generation of graphics cards in the second half of this year, after all, the release date of the last graphics card was in September 2020, and the second half of this year is a hardware update cycle of nearly 24 months. And this time, whether it is NVIDIA or AMD will use a new process, including TSMC or Samsung's 5nm process, which is much higher than the current 7nm or 8nm in transistor density, which can allow chip design companies to have a lot of design space in stacking transistors, such as RTX 40 series graphics cards in the number of CUDA is much higher than the current 30 series graphics cards, thus in single-threaded performance and multi-threaded performance has a great improvement. Of course, with the increase in the number of CUDA, the power consumption of 40 series graphics cards has also increased, and players may need to buy more powerful power supplies. Of course, don't forget Intel, the semiconductor giant will also launch its own discrete graphics in 2022
Motherboard: A large-scale replacement is coming
Compared with the hot and controversial CPU and GPU market, the motherboard market seems to have become a small transparency in 2021, and there are not too many waves, especially for the AMD platform, because there is no new generation of processor launch, so the motherboard industry, especially the AMD motherboard, has not done much, and more is only optimized for the power supply unit to meet the overclocking of the Ryzen processor. However, Intel here due to the update of the 11th generation and 12th generation of Core processors, so that motherboard manufacturers launched two generations of different terminal products. It's just that the 11th generation is too short-lived to know what new ideas consumers who buy motherboards for 11th generation Core processors have.
Not enough to 2022, with the replacement of CPU and memory, the motherboard industry will also usher in new development opportunities. In addition to Intel's Z600 series chipsets for 12th-generation Core processors, AMD is finally going to update the CPU socket with the Zen 4 architecture processor, from AM4 to AM5, and the CPU has finally become a contact. At this time, AMD fans want to buy CPU, can not get support through the BIOS. And including PCIe 5.0, DDR5 memory and WiFi 6E support can be supported on AMD's new generation of motherboards, and AMD motherboards will also usher in new development space.
Storage industry: DDR5 memory has just grown, and PCIe 4.0 SSDs have gradually become popular
The most important thing for the storage industry this year is the mass adoption of DDR5 memory. After Intel launched the 12th generation library processor last year, major memory manufacturers also launched the first batch of DDR5 memory, starting from 4800MHz, the current mainstream version is 5200MHz, and some enthusiast-level products can reach 6000MHz.
However, when DDR5 was just launched, we encountered a rather embarrassing thing, that is, compared with the current extremely mature DDR4 memory, DDR5 memory actually in addition to providing higher memory bandwidth, in the rest of the application performance, especially in the game application has not achieved obvious advantages, the reason is that the latency of DDR5 is generally higher than DDR4, while the swaddling DDR5 memory is far more than DDR4 memory in terms of price, the same capacity reached 2-3 times. Therefore, consumers have to keep an eye on the purchase of DDR5 memory, and even switch to the DDR4 version of the 12th generation platform, which is quite unfavorable for the popularity of DDR5 memory.
As for SSDs, more storage vendors have joined PCIe 4.0 SSDs this year, and have also launched massive PCIe 4.0 channel-based enthusiast-grade SSDs, which have reached a fairly high level of performance. In addition, companies such as Changjiang Storage have also launched self-developed 3D NAND flash memory, which has a certain market share in the pcIe 4.0 SSD field. In addition, SSDs continue to increase the trend of no increase in price, and the price of large-capacity SSDs is becoming more and more civilian, but we have found that with the increase in the number of 3D NAND flash memory layers, the speed of flash memory itself continues to decrease, and more and more SSDs use large-capacity dynamic caches, and the loss of flash memory is also increased, which is also a side effect of the popularity of large-capacity flash memory.
In 2022, whether it is memory or storage or stability, the most important thing is to use the new generation of platforms and abundant production capacity to make DDR5 and PCIe 4.0 SSD more civilian in terms of price, in addition, higher frequency DDR5 memory is also with the memory manufacturers continue to polish and optimize, and officially meet with everyone.
Peripherals: The quadratic tile is finished
For the peripheral market in 2021, in fact, there is nothing to say, hardware manufacturers are the same as we expect, playing the two-dimensional brand, more and more manufacturers have launched their own cute mother, in anticipation of the favor of hardware otaku, in addition to the 11th generation, 12th generation Core processor more and more serious heat, like the chassis power supply manufacturers are also constantly allowing hardware to innovate, thereby meeting higher heat dissipation needs. In 2022, these manufacturers will undoubtedly continue to play the two-dimensional brand, so as to make their products occupy more market share.
Summary: Normal delivery is success
Last year, for the entire DIY market, the impact of the chip shortage was really impressive, and the resulting DIY hardware shortage also made consumers resentful. In particular, some hardware upstream manufacturers are blocked by many netizens, but they have no choice without them, which makes consumers enter a dilemma. For consumers, the desire of the hardware market in 2022 is actually very simple, manufacturers have sufficient supply, no premium, is a victory. As for how much performance can the performance of the hardware be improved compared to the previous generation? Whether different RGB lighting effects have been added is no longer the primary consideration for users. Fortunately, as the virtual currency market continues to fall, at least for now, it seems that the mine owners who grab hardware with players should stop for a while.