For almost two years, we’ve been pushing prices up to where they’ve reached an absurd point. Although NAND Flashes are the only ones saved, the graphics card market and now the CPU market are out of control, but luckily everything that has a beginning has an end. This end will already take place in this 2022 according to IDC and with it will come the price adjustments given the war between Intel, AMD, Apple and now Qualcomm.
After the increase in demand and prices, a sharp cooling of the market is expected based on a stagnation of the sector and a gradual increase in production, which, added to the new competition in markets such as those described for CPUs. and GPUs, results in lower prices as much as possible in order to compete. But, if the market is dominated, why will they shrink, being an oligopoly?
Intel and AMD are no longer alone: ARM on the prowl
While the x86 processor market is still booming and there is no reason to believe that it could lose its vigor, it is also true that ARM will perform very well in 2022. It is not only space that needs to be taken into account. occupied by the two giants, but all the gaps in the market that must be filled and that there are more and more. Although those of Lisa Su and Pat Gelsinger have their own space and according to the firm IDC the market and its shipments will increase by almost 12% in 2022, the reality is that this figure will be reduced if one takes into account the fact that in 2021 the sector grew by 13%.
That is to say that shipments are reduced and with that the revenues will stagnate or even drop, which suggests a natural adjustment which should take place little by little in all companies. But the factor of new competition is lurking and the data for the two giants does not look very promising as of next year.
Apple and Qualcomm are real competition
While it may seem like they are competing with each other in different industries, this is not really the case. This is because x86 and ARM are not comparatively “rivals”, so companies include their settings in a higher layer such as “mobility”. Here what is tried is to reach as many users as possible by selling laptops or mobile devices and here APUs and CPUs struggle with SoC M1 and Snapdragon from you to you.
Intel responded to the M1 with Alder Lake, AMD has nothing in the energy efficiency section, Qualcomm with its Snapdragon 8 Gen 1
In fact, there are already analysts claiming that the Red and Blue teams must respond strongly to these new threats and at the same time compete on their own in the high end. Here AMD may have the upper hand with Zen 4, but Intel has done much better by targeting all sectors with more than interesting and above all effective offers as such.
What about Samsung and its Exynos? Well they look really bad, a leak came out yesterday and was removed because a major leak called the news insufficient and disappointing SoC with RDNA 2 So to their credit, it looks like Koreans won’t be very high this year.
Ultimately, the fight will be at 4 this year, shipments will drop, prices will adjust and there will be reductions, production will increase and the sector will finally stabilize. Are the good times coming to PC? The price war between Intel, AMD, Apple and Qualcomm is looming on the horizon, we will see in 11 months how far it will go.
