Apex IT Devices

Organizations are Refurbished Component Supply chain Challenges

The worldwide problem with computer chip supply is a major obstacle that is likely to last long into 2022.

The worldwide spread of COVID-19, along with other manufacturing difficulties and growing consumer demand, has contributed to the current chip scarcity. Because of this, supply chains have been experiencing significant delays, which has a domino impact on the economy as a whole.

What, exactly, are computer chips?

You can think of the "brain" of any modern electronic gadget, from a cell phone to a car, as a chip, also known as a semiconductor or microchip. Chips come in a wide range of sizes, but no matter what it is, making one takes a lot of time, effort, and skill. Intel's Xeon CPU, for instance, is a very complicated chip that can operate 4.2 times as many virtual machines per server as previous generations and is ideal for complex machine learning applications.


What caused the shortfall to occur?

When factories shut down in the early stages of the COVID-19 epidemic, it caused a temporary delay in semiconductor supply. However, despite production having just returned to normal, a surge in demand brought on by shifts in consumer behavior has led to a severe lack of chips.

Every industry is feeling the effects of this perfect storm of supply and demand problems, and things are only expected to grow worse. It can take up to two years for a newly constructed chip factory to reach full production capacity, and as much as £7 billion.

Chip production uses a lot of water, thus environmental concerns may also be at play, as was recently shown when a factory in Taiwan shut down because of a severe drought. Additionally, future chip shortages may be exacerbated by the widely expected global water shortages.

The epidemic clearly showed that the worldwide supply chain of computer chips is extremely vulnerable and slow to adjust to changes in demand. With a growing demand for their chips, manufacturers are increasing their pricing, which drives up the final price of consumer electronics.

Because component shortages are expected to last for months and the need for IT solutions is rising, companies have begun looking elsewhere for a solution.

Below, we detailed what companies and individuals may do to prepare for the upcoming global chip shortage:

Prefer reconditioned to brand new?

Companies are increasingly looking to the reconditioned market as a means of avoiding long wait times for IT hardware.

When properly refurbished, used IT hardware operates just like brand-new hardware does, and improved hardware can even outperform the most basic settings on brand-new PCs & notebooks.

Moreover, our most recent study, which was published as a peer-reviewed journal by IEEE, found that reconditioned gear can outperform new devices with the correct modifications.

With a reliable refurbishment expert, you may buy with complete confidence because their guarantees and testing methods are on the level with, if not better than, those of the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

Improvements, not demolition, are being made.

Businesses are looking more closely at their existing IT gear to determine which devices need to be replaced and which can be improved in order to maintain their IT hardware operates & infrastructure while keeping costs to a minimum.

When it comes to desktop computers, for instance, a company that is having trouble obtaining new ones owing to a lack of chips might think about investing in improvements to the central processing unit, hard disc drive, solid-state drive, and random-access memory.

Since the current chip scarcity situation shows no signs of abating, our refresh service is a great option for companies wishing to extend the life of their PCs and laptops at a low cost and with minimal hassle.

Reduce server sprawl and maximize server capacity.

Intel and AMD, two of the biggest names in the server industry, are warning consumers of significantly longer wait times for new server orders. This is because there is a severe shortage of resistors, capacitors, and circuit boards—all of which are required in high quantities to manufacture a central processing unit.

Due to the difficulty of rapidly expanding production capacities to meet the ever-increasing demand for computing, there is no certainty about when supply chain pressure would ease. If a company needs to upgrade its server infrastructure but finds itself suddenly unable to do so, it runs the danger of experiencing disruptions in service and a weakening of its supporting infrastructure.

As a result, many companies are looking to refurbishment specialists for affordable, optimized servers estates to reduce this risk, Interact, develops and sells software for managing operational efficiency; this software may be used to measure the effectiveness of a server's configuration without disrupting its operation. In turn, this provides advice on how firms might enhance server efficiency and cut energy costs.

The University of East London collaborated on an Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Project (KTP) to create Interact, which combines state-of-the-art machine learning with hardware benchmarking conducted over thousands of man-hours.