According to TrendForce research, as output from Kioxia and WDC grows month by month, it has become obvious that production capacity is sufficient to meet increased bit demand. However, post-pandemic demand for consumer electronics such as laptops will no longer lead to flagging orders. Coupled with slow destocking among Chinese smartphone brands due to the pandemic and rising inflation, these factors will lead to oversupply in the 3Q22 NAND Flash market, in turn affecting a price drop of 0~5% in 3Q22.

In terms of Client SSD, although a backstop for business notebook orders remains, demand for consumer notebook and Chromebook orders lags behind 2021, especially as PC brands stock more conservatively. Their intention to actively reduce inventory is obvious and the volume of orders in peak season may fall behind last year. However, as SSD production capacity gradually returns to normal, supply of client SSDs continues to increase. In addition, shipments of Kioxia and WDC products been delivered in succession. In order to avoid a sharp increase in inventory, the supply side is willing to let prices spike. Client SSD pricing is expected to reverse direction and move downwards approximately 3-8% in 3Q22.

With the launch of Apple Silicon for Mac computers, Apple has established itself as a great user of the Arm instruction set. Starting with M1, the company released an entirely new family of products running Apple Silicon. Today, thanks to the research of Strategy Analytics company, we have information that Apple is capturing as much as 90% of the revenue share present in the Arm PC market. The Arm PC market is a tiny subset of the entire PC market, mainly equipped with one-off Windows-on-Arm devices, Chromebook PCs, and Apple Macs. With the naturally low prices of the remaining Arm PCs, Apple Arm PCs offer a relatively high price point and a much more incredible selection of products.

On the global scale, Arm PCs now account for 9% of the total PC market share, where x86 vendors are dominating the field. "Apple's M-series family of processors set the benchmark and gave Apple a 2-3-year lead over the rest of the Arm-based PC processor vendors. Qualcomm captured just 3% revenue share in the Arm-based notebook PC processor market in 2021 and lags Apple in CPU performance," said Sravan Kundojjala, Director of Handset Component Technologies service at Strategy Analytics. This points to a particular case of Apple's better product and feeding the demand with higher-performing processors. Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia should yield different results in the coming years, as the new IP is yet to appear in Qualcomm SoCs.

According to TrendForce, market conditions in 1H22 were chaotic and there was disparate demand for chips of varying functionality. Given the global development of electronic devices and power systems, overall demand for power management ICs (PMIC) is still relatively good. PMICs are used in consumer electronics, communications, computing, industrial control, automotive and other fields. In 2H22, supply and demand gradually diverged and demand for automotive Switching Regulators, Multi Channel PMICs was strongest.

According to TrendForce, there are various specifications and types of PMICs, including Linear Regulators, etc. Even usage scenario dependent products such as Battery Charging & Management, Voltage References, and USB Power Delivery ICs all fall into this category.

Jon Peddie Research reports that the global PC-based graphics processor units (GPU) market reached 96 million units in Q1'22 and PC GPUs shipments decreased 6.2% due to disturbances in China, Ukraine, and the pullback from the lockdown elsewhere. However, the fundamentals of the GPU and PC market are solid over the long term, JPR predicts GPUs will have a compound annual growth rate of 6.3% during 2022-2026 and reach an installed base of 3.3 million units at the end of the forecast period. Over the next five years, the penetration of discrete GPUs (dGPU) in the PC market will grow to reach a level of 46%.

AMD's overall market share percentage from last quarter increased 0.7%, Intel's market share decreased by -2.4%, and Nvidia's market share increased 1.69%, as indicated in the following chart.

According to TrendForce research, North American data centers saw an improvement in components supply after February, driving a recovery in purchase order volume. As Server brands returned to normal in-office work following the pandemic, the increase in capital expenditures on related information equipment has also boosted order growth. The addition of Kioxia's raw material contamination incident led to an increase in the pricing of certain rush orders, pushing up overall Enterprise SSD revenue in 1Q22 to US$5.58 billion, or 14.1% growth QoQ.

According to TrendForce, Samsung and SK hynix (including Solidigm) were the top two players in 1Q22. At the beginning of the year, demand from hyperscale data centers resulted in high inventory levels due to component mismatches, leading Samsung's order growth missing expectations. However, as repercussions from the WDC and Kioxia contamination incident hit NAND Flash production capacity in 1Q22, server customers quickly turned to Samsung for additional orders, driving the company's 1Q22 revenue to US$2.77 billion, up 14.8% QoQ.

According to TrendForce research, looking at NAND Flash wafers, the pricing of which more sensitively reflects the market, suppliers are increasingly motivated to cut prices in exchange for sales due to weak retail demand since March and a more conservative outlook for shipments of other end products. The price of NAND Flash wafers is expected to begin falling in May and the supply of NAND Flash will gradually overtake demand in 2H22. The price decline of NAND Flash wafers in 3Q22 may reach 5~10%.

At the same time, TrendForce indicates that February's contamination incident at Kioxia was expected to tighten the market in 2Q22 and 3Q22. However, as a consequence of rising inflation and the war between Russia and Ukraine, market demand for consumer products in the traditional peak season of the second half of the year is trending conservative and the prices of client SSD, eMMC, and UFS in 3Q22 will be flat compared to 2Q22, breaking from the original expectation that prices may rise. In terms of enterprise SSDs, as demand for data centers remains strong, no significant correction in demand has yet been observed. However, as the overall NAND Flash market gradually moves into oversupply, prices will only grow slightly by approximately 0~5% in 3Q22.

Tachyum today announced it has completed validation of its Prodigy Universal Processor and software ecosystem with the operating system FreeBSD, and completed the Prodigy instruction set architecture (ISA) for FreeBSD porting. FreeBSD powers modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms in environments that value performance, stability, and security. It is the platform of choice for many of the busiest websites and the most pervasive embedded networking and storage devices.

The validation of FreeBSD extends Tachyum's support for open-source operating systems and tools, including Linux, Yocto Project, PHP, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Apache, QEMU, Git, RabbitMQ, and more.

Global shipments of traditional PCs, including desktops, notebooks, and workstations, declined 5.1% in the first quarter of 2022 (1Q22) but exceeded earlier forecasts, according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. The PC market is coming off two years of double-digit growth, so while the first quarter decline is a change in this momentum, it doesn't mean the industry is in a downward spiral. Despite ongoing supply chain and logistical challenges, vendors still shipped 80.5 million PCs during the quarter. The 1Q22 volume marks the seventh consecutive quarter where global shipments surpassed 80 million, a feat not seen since 2012.

"The focus shouldn't be on the year-over-year decline in PC volumes because that was to be expected. The focus should be on the PC industry managing to ship more than 80 million PCs at a time when logistics and supply chain are still a mess, accompanied by numerous geopolitical and pandemic-related challenges," said Ryan Reith, group vice president with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers. "We have witnessed some slowdown in both the education and consumer markets, but all indicators show demand for commercial PCs remains very strong. We also believe that the consumer market will pick up again in the near future. The result of 1Q22 was PC shipment volumes that were near record levels for a first quarter."

Intel and AMD will be releasing new CPUs that support DDR5 DRAM solutions for PCs and servers this year. In response, the DRAM industry led by South Korean suppliers is developing solutions to complement the arrival of the new CPUs. In the midst of the gradual shift to DDR5, DRAM suppliers will also scale back the supply of DDR3 solutions, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. With Korean suppliers accelerating their withdrawal from DDR3 production, Taiwanese suppliers yet to kick off mass production using newly installed capacities, and Chinese suppliers falling short of their expected yield rate, the global supply of DDR3 solutions will undergo an impending decline. With respect to the demand side, however, not only has the supply of networking chips been ramping up, but material shortage issues are also gradually easing. As such, buyers are now procuring DDR3 solutions ahead of time, resulting in a tight supply and demand situation in the DDR3 market. TrendForce therefore expects DDR3 DRAM prices to recover from a bearish first quarter and undergo a 0-5% QoQ increase in 2Q22.

Intel today launched its 12th Gen Core Processors with vPro. Released across the company's mobile and desktop product lines, these processors are targeted at pre-built commercial desktops and commercial notebooks that companies typically issue their employees, which come with a host of security and remote-management features suitable to a large corporate environment. With this generation, Intel is bringing vPro to even more market segments, including ultraportables designed under the Intel Evo banner; a new breed of enterprise-grade Chromebooks for businesses built entirely on the Chrome OS platform and cloud-based apps; and for the first time, an SMB version of vPro called vPro Essentials, which will make it to entry-level Core i5 processors with vPro.

Security, Productivity, and Future-readiness form the three areas in which Intel innovated for 12th Gen Core processors with vPro. The company added new capabilities for Threat Detection Technology, which can detect ransomware and supply-chain attacks, and can work with various endpoint security software. Intel Hardware Shield technology prevents attacks from "below" the software (below ring-0, or at the firmware, microcode, or hardware levels). This is achieved through hardware-accelerated virtualization and encryption of the entire software environment. Hardware-based protections extend to vPro Enterprise for Chrome.

China is reacting to new outbreaks of the Omicron variant of the Coronavirus with partial lockdowns. This could further delay the availability of laptops with 12th Gen Intel Core processors and NVIDIA's Ti graphics cards, which debuted at the beginning of the year. The first factories have already been closed in Suzhou in the east of the country. Supply chain and logistics bottlenecks, a shortage of certain chip types and price increases are already on the horizon.

Following its acquisition of FPGA and network hardware giant Xilinx, AMD is a larger company in terms of market capitalization. At closing bell on Tuesday (15/02), this figure stands at $199.58 billion, which for the very first time in AMD's history, beats rival Intel, which closed at $197.20 billion. Chiakokhua, aka Retired Engineer, provided the calculation that arrives at the $199.58 billion market cap. Before close, AMD had a share-count of 1.216 billion. 427 million shares were issued to Xilinx shareholders, resulting in a share-count (after close) of 1.643 billion, which at a share price of $121.47 works out to $199.58 billion. At $121.47, AMD is still trading around 26% lower than its all-time high price of $165.46.

Today, the Commission proposes a comprehensive set of measures to ensure the EU's security of supply, resilience and technological leadership in semiconductor technologies and applications. The European Chips Act will bolster Europe's competitiveness, resilience and help achieve both the digital and green transition. Recent global semiconductors shortages forced factory closures in a wide range of sectors from cars to healthcare devices. In the car sector, for example, production in some Member States decreased by one third in 2021. This made more evident the extreme global dependency of the semiconductor value chain on a very limited number of actors in a complex geopolitical context. But it also illustrated the importance of semiconductors for the entire European industry and society.

The EU Chips Act will build on Europe's strengths - world-leading research and technology organisations and networks as well as host of pioneering equipment manufacturers - and address outstanding weaknesses. It will bring about a thriving semiconductor sector from research to production and a resilient supply chain. It will mobilise more than €43 billion euros of public and private investments and set measures to prevent, prepare, anticipate and swiftly respond to any future supply chains disruption, together with Member States and our international partners. It will enable the EU to reach its ambition to double its current market share to 20% in 2030.

Although no official word on NVIDIA's rumored failed acquisition of Arm has been announced, UK politicians are now pushing for SoftBank to float Arm Holdings on the UK stock market. This has at least to some degree to do with the fact that the UK wants to keep Arm in the UK, partially due to some claimed national security concerns that apparently weren't present five years ago when the company was sold to SoftBank.

Arm Holdings is said to be worth around £30 billion on its own and several British MP's (Members of Parliament) have stepped up to say that the Arm Holdings should return to the London stock market rather than elsewhere, such as New York, "to ensure its interests and those of its investors are aligned with our national interest" and that the company "should stay British". Time will tell what happens to Arm, but until we have official word from NVIDIA and SoftBank, we have to assume that there's still ongoing discussions between the two parties.

Exponential demand growth for remote and unmanned terminals in smart home, logistics, manufacturing and other end-user applications has driven iterative updates in Wi-Fi technology. Among the current generations of technologies, Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) is mainstream while Wi-Fi 6 and 6E (802.11ax) are at promotional stages, according to TrendForce's investigations. In order to meet the connection requirements of industry concepts such as the Metaverse, many major manufacturers have trained their focus on the faster and more stable next generation 802.11be Wi-Fi standard amendment, commonly known as Wi-Fi 7. Considering technical characteristics, maturity, and product certification status, Wi-Fi 6 and 6E are expected to surpass Wi-Fi 5 to become mainstream technology in 2022, with global market share expected to reach 58%.

Server processors tend to be one of the most profitable businesses for AMD and Intel. Thus, investment groups and analysts closely monitor happenings in the server and data center world. A report from Mizuho Securities (investment bank) Managing Director Jordan Klein states that many upcoming changes on the server processor front are coming this year. Mr. Klein cites sources over at Insupur Systems, one of the most prominent server vendors. More precisely, Dolly Wu is the VP and GM of Datacenter/Cloud at Inspur. According to the report, AMD and Intel will change their strategy in the server market going forward in 2022.

As far as AMD is concerned, the company plans to increase the pricing of its EPYC processors by 10-30%. This increase should be a bit easier on the strategic cloud customers. The report also indicates that as the demand far exceeds the supply of EPYC processors, AMD increases prices and makes a "take it or leave it" offer, resulting in most customers accepting the increased costs. Another interesting tidbit from the report was the talk about Intel. The blue team laid out its strategy to launch highly-anticipated Sapphire Rapids Xeons in Q2 of 2022. However, it will maybe get delayed to Q3 of 2022. Intel doesn't plan to increase prices to remain competitive with AMD, so the server space will see Intel fighting to regain the lost market share.

The semicondustor market in 3Q21 is red hot with total revenue of the global top 10 IC design (fabless) companies reaching US$33.7 billion or 45% growth YoY, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. In addition to the Taiwanese companies MediaTek, Novatek, and Realtek already on the list, Himax comes in at number ten, bringing the total number of Taiwanese companies on the top 10 list to 4.

Qualcomm has been buoyed by continuing robust demand for 5G mobile phones form major mobile phone manufacturers with further revenue growth from its processor and radio frequency front end (RFFE) departments. Qualcomm's IoT department benefited from strong demand in the consumer electronics, edge networking, and industrial sectors, posting revenue growth of 66% YoY, highest among Qualcomm departments. In turn, this drove Qualcomm's total 3Q21 revenue to US$7.7 billion, 56% growth YoY, and ranking first in the world.

Factors such as the rising popularity of topics related to the metaverse and UGC (user-generated content), as well as the rapid increase in AR/VR device shipment, will likely result in the creation of a growing body of virtual reality content in the market, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. TrendForce expects annual global virtual reality content revenue to grow at a 40% CAGR from US$2.16 billion in 2021 to US$8.31 billion in 2025.

TrendForce further indicates that gaming/entertainment, videos, and social interactions comprise the primary categories of virtual reality content. Incidentally, as the construction of the virtual world and the development of virtual reality content are unlikely to be accomplished by only a handful of companies alone, companies in this space will therefore place an increasing emphasis on UGC instead. Leading companies will likely leverage the build-out of virtual reality platforms/environments and the provisioning of developmental tools/interfaces in order to not only lower the barrier to entry for content creation, but also raise user participation, thereby driving up the content market for virtual reality applications.

Due to material shortages caused by insufficient semiconductor supply, to date, power management IC (PMIC) prices remain on an upward trend, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. Average selling price (ASP) for 1H22 is forecast to increase by nearly 10%, reaching a record six year high.

In terms of the global supply chain, in addition to the production capacity of major IDM manufacturers including TI, Infineon, ADI, STMicroelectronics, NXP, ON Semiconductor, Renesas, Microchip, ROHM (Maxim has been acquired by ADI and Dialog by Renesas), IC design houses such as Qualcomm and MediaTek (MTK) have obtained a certain level of production capacity from foundries. Of these, TI is in a leadership position and the aforementioned companies possess a combined market share of over 80%.

Jon Peddie Research reports the growth of the global PC-based Graphics Processor Units (GPU) market reached 101 million units in Q3'21 and PC CPUs shipments increased by 9% year over year. Overall, GPUs will have a compound annual growth rate of -1.1% during 2020-2025 and reach an installed base of 3,249 million units at the end of the forecast period. Over the next five years, the penetration of discrete GPUs (dGPU) in the PC will grow to reach a level of 31%.

AMD's overall market share percentage from last quarter increased 1.4%, Intel's market share decreased by -6.2%, and Nvidia's market share increased 4.86%, as indicated in the following chart.

As the global vaccination rate rose, and border restrictions in Europe and North America eased, social activities also began to enter a period of recovery, with the consumer electronics market seemingly ready for the arrival of the traditional peak season in 2H21, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. At the same time, however, the global supply chain was affected by delays in maritime transport, skyrocketing shipping costs, and component shortages, in addition to already-prohibitive price hikes for certain components in 1H21. Given the parallel rise in both material and manufacturing costs, the market for end products has not undergone the expected cyclical upturn in 2H21. Even so, the overall demand for and shipment of smartphones, notebook computers, and monitors experienced QoQ increases in 3Q21, thereby driving up businesses for major OSAT (outsourced semiconductor assembly and test) companies. For 3Q21, the revenues of the top 10 OSAT companies reached US$8.89 billion, a 31.6% YoY increase.

Qualcomm has been in the game of creating SoCs for the PC market with the company's Snapdragon lineup. These processors mainly were beefed-up versions of their mobile designs and were based on the Arm instruction set architecture (ISA). Microsoft has backed this effort by creation Windows-on-Arm (WoA) project that enables the Windows OS to operate on Arm processors. However, up until now, Qualcomm's designs were not very powerful as they represented a relatively moderate approach to the problem and almost made no sense of purchase compared to the standard laptops equipped with x86 processors from AMD and Intel. This is about to change.

According to the news from Investor Day yesterday, Qualcomm is preparing high-performance Arm SoCs for the PC market. The company has recently acquired Nuvia Inc., a startup focused on creating novel IPs based on Arm ISA. And this is what Qualcomm will use in building its next-generation PC processors. As the company plans, in August of 2022, it should start sampling OEM partners with these new chips, and we will be seeing them in consumers' hands in early 2023. If everything goes as planned, this should represent direct competition to AMD, Intel, and now Apple in the high-end SoC market. After PCs, the company plans to tackle datacenter, mobile, and automotive market.

After all the reports of component shortages over the past few months, it now seems that the power related problems in China are having an effect on demand of passive components, such as MLCCs (Multilayer Ceramic Capacitor), various types of resistors and inductors among others. As such, manufacturers of said components in Taiwan are cautious about demand for the rest of this quarter, with even big players like Yageo - they're the third largest manufacturer in the world of passive components - being conservative, if somewhat positive about shipments this quarter, according to Digitimes.

As many of the Taiwanese makers of passive components have factories in China, the power cuts in several provinces are adversely affecting these companies. In the case of Yageo, they claim to be able to maintain their production at its largest facility in China, due to it not being located in one of the so far not affected provinces. Some of its competitors aren't as lucky and have already seen losses in production and aren't expecting things to improve. Besides the power outages, there are still issues with the logistics and shipping, which is further causing problems.

According to the latest forecast from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Gaming Tracker, worldwide shipments of gaming PCs and monitors continue to grow at rates faster than their parent markets. For gaming PCs, which includes both desktop and notebook PCs, unit shipments are expected to grow from 41.3 million in 2020 and to 52.3 million in 2025. Similarly, the gaming monitor market is expected to jump from 14.2 million units shipped to 26.4 million during the same time frame. This equates to the two product categories having five-year compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) of 4.8% and 13.2% respectively.

The solid growth projection is based on strong recent trends. Despite high logistics costs as well as shortages of components affecting both PCs and displays, shipments in 2021 have remained brisk. The second quarter of 2021 (2Q21) ended with combined shipments of 15.6 million gaming monitors and PCs, an increase of 19.3% compared to the same quarter in 2020.

If it wasn't bad enough that we're in the middle of a pandemic, which has resulted in major shipping issues globally and a semiconductor shortage, it now looks like electronics are likely to get even more expensive due to skyrocketing prices of many rare earth metals.
Nikkei is reporting that many often overlooked materials, such as neodymium and the lesser known praseodymium, have increased by almost 74 percent since the same time last year and that's only one of several key materials that have increased in price by 50 percent or more in a year.

It's no secret that lithium has increased in price and it now costs about 150 percent of what it was costing last year. However, many other, less obvious materials have also increased in price, with copper up over 37 percent and tin up almost 82 percent in a year. To TPU's readers this mainly means that you can expect higher costs for PCBs and all the components that are soldered onto them, as tin is used to solder just about every component in place.