This year was the first time that companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek turned to TSMC’s 3nm technology to launch their cutting-edge chipsets. In the case of the Dimensity 9400, producing it using advanced lithography isn’t cheap, forcing phone makers like Vivo to maintain healthy profit margins by increasing the price of its latest X200 series by 7.5 percent. This upward trend is expected to be exacerbated by the arrival of Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, which will reportedly be announced today.
The Dimensity 9400 may undercut the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 with a lower price, but that doesn’t change the fact that smartphone chipset prices have increased significantly.
Last year, Apple was the only company to introduce 3nm chipsets covering the A17 Pro and M3 families. The reason why MediaTek and Qualcomm didn’t get around to utilizing TSMC’s old 3nm ‘N3B’ node is simple; Tape-out costs alone for Apple’s M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max are estimated at $1 billion. Of course, it wasn’t financially viable for MediaTek and Qualcomm to absorb such costs, but they also had to remain competitive in the industry, so they bounced back, starting with the Dimensity 9400.
Unfortunately, the transition from the 4nm N4P node to the 3nm N3E has forced phone partner MediaTek to increase the prices of its flagship phones by a delta of 7.5 percent compared to market expectations, at least according to the Economic Daily News. Apple has bucked this trend as it kept the starting price of its smaller ‘Pro’ model at $999 while only charging a $100 premium when it announced the iPhone 15 Pro Max, and that too by offering twice the storage at 256GB.
The report doesn’t talk about how expensive the Dimensity 9400 will be to mass produce, but previous rumors suggested that the price of the chipset would be $155, making it 20 percent higher than the Dimensity 9300. The price of this chipset is expected to increase further, as reported by MediaTek. there was no choice but to stick with TSMC as Samsung couldn’t overcome the bottleneck in improving the yield of its 3nm GAA process. Additionally, as the number of wafer transistors increases while lithography improves, prices will skyrocket exponentially.
News Source: Economic Daily News
