Gaming and Chip Manufacturing: What Is Coming?
Game developers and gaming equipment manufacturers appeared to have no further prospects after the successful year of 2020. The 2021 statistics, however, surprised even the most optimistic of them.
According to The NPD Group, an American market research company:
- Consumer spending on gaming hardware and PC accessories in 2021 reached $5.74 billion, a 25% year-on-year growth. And it is just in the US.
- Desktops, laptops, and microphones showed the highest revenue growth with 38%, 29%, and 25% respectively.
- The computer games screentime has also increased. The NPD Evolution of Entertainment 2021 report confirmed that PC gamers in 2021 averaged 7.7 hours of gaming per week, which is one hour more than in 2020.
Analysts, however, believe that such rapid growth will slow down. Revenue from PC hardware and accessories is expected to fall by 4%.
That is an old and well-known problem — the global shortage of microchips. It goes beyond that, however.
Currently, only three big companies are capable of producing advanced processors. These are American Intel and two Asian giants — Korean Samsung and market leader Taiwan TSMC. And according to recent news, TSMC’s 3 nm process is already fully booked until 2024.
About 71.4 billion dollars has been invested in these new chips, and the first 55,000 units will be transferred to Apple. The next step is to increase production to 105 thousand units, which will be passed on to AMD, NVIDIA, Xilinx, and Qualcomm.
That means that Intel, which has outsourced chip development to TSMC, has no choice but to wait for its turn. In other words, Intel can continue to use 7nm and 5nm processes for quite some time. However, such Intel chips won’t be available until 2023 at the earliest.
Manufacturers of PCs and other gaming equipment are not ready to give up despite the current situation. They are focusing on improving existing technologies and developing new ones.
Key Industry Trends in 2022
The International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) featured more than 100 new PC and gaming announcements this year, including new mobile processors and GPUs from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel.
The major trends this year are:
- Increasing device security by building hardware protocols.
- Focusing on mobile processors to enable AAA 1080p gaming on mobile/ultra-mobile platforms.
- Improving performance with new software and hardware offerings.
We should not fear a crisis, but rather follow new trends and look for ways to improve our technologies. ABC Assembly is here to help.
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