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Comment by ponzored | Hacker News Reader

Miner demand was about 50% of sales. Admittedly this is because a lot of gamers were turned off by high prices.

That demand has evaporated since the price of Bitcoin alternatives (eg. Ethereum) has plummeted, and the difficulty of mining is still very high since now ASICs can mine many coins more efficiently than consumers GPUs.

Plus it seems like Nvidia are stuck with a lot of low-end chips. Many miners were buying things like the 1060.

However, Nvidia have no direct competition in the GPU space anymore. They can hold off their next product launch for months and wait for their inventory to clear.

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>Nvidia have no direct competition in the GPU space anymore

At what level? AMD does the same thing in GPU they do in CPU: They might not hold the overall performance crown, but their value is often better at several tiers than their competition. I really want an RX 580.

The 580s, AFAICT, are only really competitive with nVidia's mid range and have been priced higher for some time due to mining.

The Vegas have not been price competitive with nVidia's higher end offerings, have been very power hungry and very hot.

AMD needs to pull something out of the bag, it's being left behind.

The Vega cards (56 and 64) were definitely priced competitively as NVidia felt the need to release the 1070 Ti out of nowhere. It sits in a weird price / performance area smack dab between the 1070 and 1080 cards. In addition, the Vega architecture is pretty efficient and your statement about being power hungry and very hot is false.

Perhaps they were when on their discounted launch price, but they quickly jumped up in price (around £100 in a week, even more a few weeks later) and just weren't available for quite some time AFAICT.

> In addition, the Vega architecture is pretty efficient and your statement about being power hungry and very hot is false.

Excuse me, but I speak from personal experience here. It's really not very efficient, I bought a 64 on launch day. It was hot, noisy and power hungry compared to nVidia cards at similar performance levels, which is the main reason I didn't keep it for long.

Stock Vegas are overvolted (ridiculously so) and clocked past their efficiency range.

The architecture is quite efficient up to ~1400MHz.

Re the competition in the gpu space: that’s also still the case in the scientific computing / ML fields, where CUDA is still several years ahead in terms of functionality and existing investment.

Disclaimer, I am long NVDA

My understanding is that it's been mostly Ethereum driving demand for GPUs. Bitcoin can be mined on dedicated ASICs and mostly is. Ethereum requires more general purpose hardware with a large pool of RAM so people use GPUs instead to mine it. I presume the recent decline in demand for mining GPUs is due to the decline in price.

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