TECH NEWS – Intel: For more than a year and a half, we’ve been in a tunnel, and the light at its end is still a long way off…

It’s the coronavirus’ omicron variant that is now present in over half of the world (although, in principle, with milder symptoms), so the solemn hope that the chip shortage will finally end and the resulting “hellishly expensive everything” thought process won’t disappear anytime soon.

Nikkei Asia interviewed Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel. He says the chip shortage will not disappear before 2023. He said this on a business trip to South East Asia. In Malaysia, he announced an investment of $7.1 billion to strengthen Intel’s manufacturing there (with manufacturing expected to begin in 2024), and he said he could announce the following facilities in the US and Europe shortly. However, these sites will take time to build, and he said that it would take at least three years to achieve more significant capacity results. The already announced production in the US, Ireland and Israel would not start soon.

One step forward, two steps back is the best way to describe the shortage of parts this year, and local constraints in the supply chain could cause droughts. Malaysia’s International Trade and Industry Minister Mohamed Azmin Ali said that Gelsinger had assured him that the country was no longer planning closures, only local closedowns, which is understandable if the epidemic is restraining itself from international (pandemic) to local (endemic) levels.

The PlayStation 5/Xbox Series pair is in short supply due to the lack of chips, DDR5 memory is not so plentiful, and the belt is tightened for video cards. A local example: a GeForce GTX 1050, a lower-tier graphics card from two generations ago with no ray tracing, costs more than 500 dollars.

Anyone who upgrades a PC these days is probably a millionaire.

Source: PCGamer