Hacker News Reader

Comment by seiferteric | Hacker News Reader

I bought a GTX1080 founders edition a few weeks after it came out over a year ago, after I was finally able to find one at best buy (of all places). I felt bad for spending all that money. I am seeing now they are selling used on ebay for more than I bought it for new. I can't remember a time in computer history where this has happened.

View on HN

There's actually a well known phenomena known as a Chip Famine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_famine

Most of the time it's an earthquake in Asia that takes power plants offline and impacts supply.

It took me weeks of searching and refreshing newegg, amazon etc. just to buy a 16-port PoE unifi switch for a reasonable price recently. No idea why but apparently a lot of others had been having similar sourcing issues.

There is a shortage of silicon wafers right now as well, which is affecting all silicon production. I rather suspect this is another cartel that's dragging its feed expanding production - like DRAM.

(DRAM/flash prices have been on a continual incline because capacity growth has not been matching expected demand growth, and this was expected to continue through next year. China told the DRAM cartel to knock it off or they'd bring state-sponsored fabs online to fill the gap... and a few weeks later Samsung signed a memorandum of understanding and now prices are expected to decline throughout this year. Just a stunning coincidence /s)

http://www.china.org.cn/business/2017-12/23/content_50157479...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/21/china_memory_insour...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-samsung-elec-chips-outloo...

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3327772-samsung-headed-china-a...

And fab time on cutting-edge nodes is expensive as well. For example, BitMain is buying up more 16nm fab time than NVIDIA right now. So certain classes of high-performance silicon like 100 GbE switches may be in shortage as well.

There was a manufacturing defect with the PoE system on those switches. Ubiquity had to bring them all back and correct it. They are available again now.

That definitely happened with GPUs back when bitcoin could be mined with GPUs. That also has happened with RAM recently as well.

Also, after a while certain enterprise hardware ends up being worth a fortune as desperate IT guys try to buy stuff as spares for a critical system that haven't been upgraded for whatever reason.

Then there's stuff like Raspberry Pi's, though they aren't really a computer part per se. That being said, computer parts occasionally do sell used for more than their list price.

> has happened with RAM recently as well.

Is happening sadly.. ram prices are still stupid

Oddly, used Jetson TK1s have always sold for higher prices on eBay than you could get them from Newegg or other suppliers, and I'm not clear on why.

I would not buy one from eBAy used. You will never know just how much lifetime you have left after a 'miner' burned it 24/7/365.

And I thought the prices were a joke, but a AMD vega RX 64, was pricing between 1,100$ and 3,000$ 2/13/17

That depends on whether or not you can easily replace fans. Or if you are even going to use the fans (if watercooling GPUs, you don't care). Other than that, they were running 24/7, but usually focusing on efficiency (undervolted), many times without a case. This is usually better than "gaming" GPUs, which are overclocked and stuffed inside a case.

another "first" in computer history - it's now more expensive to build your own gaming or "machine learning" box from parts than to just buy a pre-made gaming computer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com