Both old and new problems come together to throw a wrench in their plans

Jun 12, 2012 09:51 GMT  ·  By

Another week, another report mentioning something to the effect of AMD and NVIDIA having trouble scrounging up enough graphics processing units.

We've lost count of how many times it was said that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company was having trouble making enough 28nm chips.

We've also lost count of the many reports that refuted these claims, only to be invalidated in turn.

At least when the 40nm process was in effect, everyone was in agreement instead of never making up their minds.

At any rate, a new report from Digitimes says that TSMC still doesn't have enough 28nm chips to fill the orders of AMD and NVIDIA.

There was also mention of a so-called PC replacement trend that the PC game Diablo 3 would start (assuming it hasn't already).

Sources from graphics card makers, as Digitimes called them, are concerned that NVIDIA and AMD will miss out on the opportunities provided by this trend.

We suppose we should point out that the so-called shortage of GPUs might not be TSMC’s fault anymore, not entirely anyhow. It if were, NVIDIA and AMD would have placed orders with other foundries instead of working more closely with it.

The only other explanation is, thus, that the two GPU rivals simply placed so many orders that even a fully matured and issue-free manufacturing process would have had trouble coping with them. NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 sellout claims would corroborate this assumption.

That said, even if Diablo 3 does lead to an episode of consumer PC purchases, said buyers can always get a new graphics card later. If not, there's always the back-to-school season.

Speaking of which, September is when Intel decided to phase out the Sandy Bridge CPU series. Add to that the arrival of Windows 8 soon after and all conditions are met for customers to buy new PCs en masse, based on Intel Ivy Bridge or AMD APUs.