The ever-spiralling cost of computing components is not exactly news. But the big question is how much longer this will all continue. Unfortunately, a new interview by the BBC with TSMC, the company that manufactures so many of the chips that go into our PCs, suggests there's plenty more to come.
TSMC's Chief Financial Officer, Wendell Huang, was asked: "Are you likely to increase your prices for customers?" His answer was, well, it went like this:
"We don't increase the price suddenly, four fold, five fold," he said. Er, OK, how about two fold or three fold? The BBC didn't ask that, but Huang did continue when pressed again on the matter of TSMC increasing its prices.
"We reflect our value," Huang said, before going on to explain that TSMC's "value" includes geographic diversification, or having fabs at multiple locations across the world, technology leadership, in other words, offering the best chip production nodes, and manufacturing access, which means the abi...
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