A hot tater: It's the question we all desire to know: when is the global chip shortage going to improve? Most people in and out of the tech industry accept their own opinion, and at present Lisa Su has joined a growing consensus that says the nightmare will end, or at least go ameliorate, in the second one-half of 2022.

Speaking to Kara Swisher and CNBC tech reporter Jon Fortt at the Lawmaking Conference in Beverly Hills, California, the AMD dominate said that the first half of 2022 volition be 'likely tight' in terms of chip supply, but shortages should become less astringent in the 2nd half of the twelvemonth.

"We've always gone through cycles of ups and downs, where demand has exceeded supply, or vice versa," Su said. "This time, it's dissimilar."

"It might take, you know, 18 to 24 months to put on a new plant, and in some cases even longer than that. These investments were started perhaps a twelvemonth ago."

Graphics carte prices are on the rise once again

There accept been several factors backside the chip shortages, the primary one existence the pandemic, which not only caused supply and manufacturing issues, merely besides saw demand for products such equally PCs and consoles skyrocket.

"The pandemic has just taken demand to a new level," Su said.

Su added that crypto mining hasn't had much of an effect on the supply of AMD's graphics cards, calling it "a pretty volatile space" that shouldn't be a focus for the company. It's not as well surprising to hear such statements from Su. Earlier this calendar month, AMD, which has said it won't copy Nvidia past adding mining limiters to its products, denied prioritizing mining graphics cards over gaming; the Radeon 6000 series has even so to break into the Steam survey's main GPU listing, and there had been rumors of a mining card using AMD's Navi 12 GPU.

There'due south also People's republic of china'south recent clampdown on crytpo, in which it declared all transactions using the virtual currency illegal, making crypto mining cards less appealing to manufacturers.

"Nosotros are trying actually difficult to go more products to gamers; I get so many 'Dear Lisa, tin can you help me get a gaming card?'" Su said. "At the end of the twenty-four hours we're building for sort of consumer applications, and that's where the focus is."

It'due south been a decorated week for Su. Joe Biden recently added her to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), and she became the get-go women to win the Robert N. Noyce Medal from the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineer.

Nvidia also believes the bit shortage will alleviate in the centre or latter half of 2022, as does analyst house IDC. That would hateful we have around a yr to look until nosotros tin upgrade to a new Ampere or RDNA 2 carte du jour without needing a lot of luck/coin/both. But many are skeptical about this prediction, especially given how much time volition be required earlier supply can see need. Non to mention all the new problems that are arising.