"These price increases have multiple intertwining causes, some direct and some less so: inflation, pandemic-era supply crunches, the unpredictable trade policies of the Trump administration, and a gradual shift among console makers away from selling hardware at a loss or breaking even in the hopes that game sales will subsidize the hardware. And you never want to rule out good old shareholder-prioritizing corporate greed.
But one major factor, both in the price increases and in the reduction in drastic “slim”-style redesigns, is technical: the death of Moore’s Law and a noticeable slowdown in the rate at which processors and graphics chips can improve."
Is it Moores law failing or have we finally reached the point where capitalists are not even pretending to advance technology in order to charge higher prices? Like are we actually not able to make things faster and cheaper anymore or is the market controlled by a monopoly that sees no benefit in significantly improving their products? My opinion has been leaning more and more towards the latter since the pandemic.
This has little to do with “capitalists” and everything to do with the fact that we’ve basically reached the limit of silicon.
While blaming anything and everything on “capitalism” is disingenuous, it really does have to do with a lack of competition in the space. None of the incumbents have any incentive to really put much effort into improving the performance of gaming GPUs. PC CPUs face a similar issue. They’re good enough for the vast majority of users. There is no sizable market that would justify spending huge amounts of money on developing new products. High end gaming PCs and media production workstations are niche products. The real money is made in data centre products.
I mean, when the definition of economy can be “how the species produces what it needs” then the answer to a problem is probably capitalism even if that answer explains very little
Because people continue to accept that price by agreeing to pay it. The price of a product is dictated by what people are willing to pay for it. If the price is so low that the seller isn’t happy with it, they don’t sell it and stop making it.
In other words, if you think Nintendo prices are bullshit price gouging, then vote with your wallet. With enough votes, the prices come down or the company goes under. You don’t have that luxury of choice when it comes to groceries or shelter, but you absolutely do when it comes to luxury entertainment expenses. Make them earn your money.
I don’t agree. It is capitalism, but not in a bad way. Simply put it is economy logic. Chip market has shifted from consumer market to the enterprise market.
So because the supply is limited, the demand has gone way up, and enteprise market has a lot, a mean a lot of money to spare buying, because it is an investment for them and not entertainment.
Also some bad capitalist tacticts in other areas, hard drives for example, that the big players reduced production to keep prices from falling. They cotribute to the problem, but they are not the major factor.
Moore’s law started failing in 2000, when single core speeds peaked, leading to multi core processors since. Memory and storage still had ways to go. Now, the current 5nm process is very close to the limits imposed by the laws of physics, both in how small a laser beam can be and how small a controlled chemical reaction can be done. Unless someone can figure a way to make the whole chip fabrication process in less steps, or with higher yield, or with cheaper machines or materials, even if at 50nm or larger, don’t expect prices to drop.
Granted, if TSMC stopped working in Taiwan, we’d be looking at roughly 70% of all production going poof, so that can be considered a monopoly (it is also their main defense against China, the “Silicon Shield”, so there’s more than just capitalistic greed at play for them)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po-nlRUQkbI - How are Microchips Made? 🖥️🛠️ CPU Manufacturing Process Steps | Branch Education
Very interesting! I was aware of the 5nm advancements and the limitations of chip sizes approaching the physical limitations of the material but I had been assuming since we worked around the single core issue a similar innovation would appear for this bottleneck. It seems like the focus instead was turned towards integrating AI into the gpu architecture and cranking up the power consumption for marginal gains in performance instead of working towards a paradigm shift. Thanks for the in depth explanation though, I always appreciate an opportunity to learn more about this type of stuff!
