WHY ARE THE NEW GPUS NOWHERE TO BE FOUND? WE EXPLAIN WHAT IS HAPPENING
The pandemic that has marked and continues to characterize our daily lives for a year has left deep scars even in the hardware market . What is happening on the gaming front and especially in the console sector goes hand in hand with what is possible to experience in the research and purchase of latest generation video cards. techgeeksblogger
However, the shortage of graphics cards is not to be
attributed to single and isolated factors. This is a phenomenon as extensive as
it is lasting and apparently rooted, which has behind it a series of
contributing causes of which the COVID-19 pandemic was a trigger but not the
only one.
A limited offer
The reduced ability to respond effectively to the growing
market demand is also and above all due to the structure of the production chains.
Since mass production is linked to outsourcing for AMD and NVIDIA , the
production of semiconductors, memories and wafers in partnership with TSMC and
Samsung has created logistical and commercial challenges. Samsung itself has
admitted that it has encountered enormous difficulties in sourcing the raw
materials for the production of the wafers - the silicon substrate of the board
- and the GDDR6 / 6X VRAM modules.
Although NVIDIA itself has stated that the limits of the
offer go far beyond the shortage of silicon and therefore of wafers, the
practice of outsourcing, or outsourcing, has given way to the needs of the
smartphone market, which is characterized by a much larger audience than the
desktop sector.
Samsung, for example, has also managed to distribute its new
flagships of the S21 family . Apple also secured not only 80% of TSMC's 5nm
production lines, but also the first 3nm chips , effectively providing a fast
track to the needs of other manufacturers.
Also not to be underrated are the costs of shipping products
from China, which have increased to dizzying levels in the last year, forcing
manufacturers to pay more in order not to have to wait long periods of time
before their goods are shipped. A final cause for concern is also the approach
of the Chinese New Year, which will lead to a reduction in production for about
two weeks.
The question
Exploded due to the various players currently present on the
market, even the demand is not without fault. With an inexorable rise in prices
that had lasted for two generations, the release of extremely attractive
proposals and excellent price / performance ratio by both AMD and NVIDIA has
shaken the market to its foundations, generating a demand above expectations. .
As stated by AMD CEO Lisa Su "it is fair to say that overall demand
exceeded our plans and, as a result, we had some supply limits at the end of
the year ".
The NVIDIA Ampere GPUs in particular have expressed an
extremely steeper generational leap than seen in the past. Since the launch of
the new GPUs, despite all the issues related to production, NVIDIA has almost
doubled sales compared to what was done in the same period by the Series 20.
Secondly, what literally devastated the consumer market was
the phenomenon of scalping . It is a method inherited from online trading ,
which has allowed organized groups to identify availability, skip the queues
and even make hundreds of purchases at the same time., effectively altering the
balance between supply and demand in order to reintroduce products on the
market at an increased cost.
A phenomenon that in some markets has been, albeit only
partially, contained thanks to particular sales policies, such as the Japanese
method of lotteries. In other countries, such as the United Kingdom , it would
be considering introducing regulations aimed at eliminating or only partially
limiting this phenomenon. A move that could also reward in the medium and long
term as this unfair practice could also expand into other sectors including
goods and services, risking to compromise the global economic fabric .
The mining finally. The new explosion of cryptocurrencies
such as Ethereum but above all Bitcoin has not only damaged an already heavily
compromised market, but is also negatively affecting the offer in the notebook
sector .
Some blockchains, such as the one behind Bitcoin, exploit
PoW-type consensus algorithms, which make mining strictly GPU-dependent. The
latest generation video card GPUs are extremely effective calculators. Since
the farms and mining rigs are composed of multi-GPU systems, with an overall
energy consumption to be carefully balanced with the economic return, the
tendency to reduce consumption combined with an overall increase in performance
makes them real objects of desire.
Unfortunately, how long this phenomenon will last is not
known. Some analysts argue that it could even last for the whole of 2021 ,
envisaging a growing shortage over the course of the year , eventually also
involving the holiday season.
