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Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

When has there ever been enough stock on highend GPUs?

It's not just that there is not enough to meet the usual demand, the supply is definitely much lower than typical. I see numbers for a major European distributor network, and there is maybe a fifth of the supply of what there was for the 2000 series, same time after launch.

Something is very definitely wrong.

Nvidia's issues might have to do with the yield issue on the new and untested Samsung 8nm process. But AMD is on the tried and tested 7nm TSMC process. I doubt they will have the fab issues, given that Apple's move to 5nm would have freed up a lot of capacity for AMD to use.

> new and untested Samsung 8nm process.

It is not new and untested, it's been in use since 2018.

It's been used since 2018 for smaller, power optimized designs. This would be the first significant high performance design, and at comparatively huge die sizes. Also claimed the process was semi-custom for nvidia, not the "standard" 8nm. Unclear what exactly was different, though, but depending on the changes (if any) it may actually not be yielding as well as a 2 year old process should

Currently at day 41 of waiting for my 3080 card in the UK.

Before Bitcoin stock was rarely a problem.

Deep learning, cryptocurrency, and the resurgence of PC gaming have all taken place over the last decade, so its hard to pin production issues on any single factor.

Personally, I think its less due to these and more due to people using bots to buy up stock for scalping. The same stocking issues have happened for the new Xbox and Playstation, and even for non-tech hardware, like the newest Warhammer 40k box set. The bot scalping issue is just becoming more pervasive.

Add Covid-19 to the list, lot of people at home. Another aspect is VR which needs as much hardware as you can give it.

Also 1440p was largely ignored, so in a jump from 1080p to 4K there's a massive increase in demand from the hardware. And at the same time, we want better refresh rates than ever. 4 times the pixels and 3 times the frames isn't easy!

I recently moved from 1080p 16:9 at 60Hz to 1440p 21:9 at 160Hz. 6 times the amount of pixel/frames. One of the reasons why performance isn't stellar even though I bought 3080 at the same time. Most games can't run anywhere near 160 fps.

Prior to the big cryptomining/ML hypes.

Back then these highend-GPUs used to be prestige projects that mostly existed for the marketing of "We have the fastest GPU!", the real money on consumer markets was made with the bulk of the volume in the mid-range.

Yes. The exception was when bitcoin prices went crazy and miners were buying them all up.

That was mostly limited to AMD cards though.

Right but if you're a gamer and you wanted an AMD card and can't get one because of crypto demand you'll buy an Nvidia card, thus causing demand to spike. Obviously it didn't spike as high as AMD but consumers will feel the shortage if demand spikes over supply, which happened in this case.

Nvidia as well made “crypto mining” cards that were just a mainline card without video output. I recall a video by LinusTechTips who attempted to get video output from one of them.

Edit: Here’s the video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4

There was a time period where pretty much the only gpu you could get was a GTX 1050 Ti. At first it was only AMD cards, right, but things changed after a while.

I seem to remember the 1070/1070ti/1080 being affected too. The lower and higher end (1060/1080ti) were the main ones to escape

Appears to be some evidence that most of the 3xxx cards were bought out by bots. Most sites were sold out more or less instantly and there's now a large supply available on ebay/amazon/etc for way over retail prices.

As a shareholder and a capitalist, I am deeply disappointed that NVidia is leaving hundreds of dollars of profit per card on the table, by allowing scalpers to pick it up.

But on a serious note - why are they doing so? Surely, they have good predictions of supply and demand - why are EBay resellers reaping the profits from the gap between the two? Why aren't these cards retailing for $1000, with price reductions happening as demand drops below supply?

NVidia does not sell the cards direct, the retailer does. Retailer does not want to deal with that much volatility in price as customers would demand refunds, so it is left to the scalpers to take on the supply risk. It is surprising that the retail version of the cards are available upon release as is and not dedicated for a period of time to OEMs - Apple, Alienware, etc. (volume customers) negotiated for guaranteed supply at premium rates.

Considering how bad Ampere lineup is against AMD, particularly when price taken into consideration, these scalpers are going to lose money. They need to sell the cards at higher than official price to make money, which is going to be hard.

And I do not feel sorry for them.

Obviously YMMV but as an example, I don't remember it being that hard to get my 980Ti back when it was somewhat new.

Right before a new generation comes out?

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