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ASPs are up due to the growth in gaming, and Apple M1 devices helped its sales surge.
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Read more.Quote:
ASPs are up due to the growth in gaming, and Apple M1 devices helped its sales surge.
I expect this growth will be accompanied by a dip.
That's rather what I was thinking TBH. On the face of it, it seems like worldwide lockdowns have encouraged people to purchase/upgrade PCs out of necessity or for entertainment, in volumes that could not be anticipated pre-COVID. A lot of that market is likely to be temporary, even if it has got more people on board in certain segments e.g. gaming.
What stood out there to me was that, comparatively, Dell took a hiding. Maybe that'll tell 'em that they need to be offering what buyers want, rather than expecting buyers to want what they're selling. Wakey, wakey, Dell.
SuperFIN_ished
Somewhat harder to find are the full year's figures.
2018: 259.6 million
2019: 266.7 million
2020: 302.6 million
(from https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS45865620 and https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS47274421).
So no wonder everything has been constantly out of stock most of the year.
The Steam surveys it looks like Nvidia sold over 3 million 3000 series to people-who-install-Steam, plus the near 8 million new consoles so that's a lot of gamers. Add the miners on top of that and GPUs going to out of stock for ages.
AMD must kick themselves for not being able to supply OEMs to no iGPUs on mainstream Ryzen.
When you're wafer limited, CPUs are much more profitable than GPUs, or CPUs with integrated GPUs. While AMD are selling every Ryzen chiplet they can produce with the wafer capacity they have available, they're not really leaving profits on the table by not being able to saturate the desktop APU market. Ryzen CPUs also need that IO die but it's produced at GloFo so not competing for TSMC 7nm capacity.
Sure, selling more APUs might increase graphics market share on paper, but given the Zen3 APU die is over twice the size of the Zen3 chiplet, in this situation it would likely cost them money. Prioritising those iGPU dies for the mobile market seems to make the most sense.
The new consoles are undoubtedly consuming a significant amount of 7nm capacity, but the console chip demand typically starts very high then drops significantly. Due to the situation, the initial peak may remain for longer than usual, but once the market stabilises (which it's already showing some signs of doing - I've seen Xboxes in stock or for preorder a few times now, and their resale price on auction sites likely makes scalpers lose money now, and PS5 scalping price is dropping too) we should see that capacity freed up.
Indeed, Pre-plague I was looking for a laptop for someone. I found Dell had options but some of them were on such insane lead time I could get a PC built to spec by PC Specialist several times over within the same timescale. Most of the available systems were missing a single vital feature / component type for their target markets or had silly compromises which weren't necessary. It seemed like a ploy to take you from £650 machines to £1500 premium machines to get everything you want / need. Also, I contacted Dell to ask for detail on certain components and got zero response.
Guess what? I went to PC Specialist and got a machine built to spec, well within budget, with everything I needed and nothing I didn't need.
Specifying a computer part by part used to be a daunting task and Dell took the hard work out, but these days everyone knows a nerd and we're not ostracized so much as people need us. There's also things like part picker forums where people enjoy spending their free time helping people with things like this. In the past, Dell could get away with telling people what they need and only advertising the nipples of a machine. Now, they have to compete with an internet full of information and people who can access it from anywhere.