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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

Is market bearing pricing really beyond insulting?

Seems like it's higher than it "should" be with GPU mining winding down due to difficulty maintaining profitability. Then again, companies will generally behave with an asymmetric pass-through if they figure it will not impact sales enough by pricing out consumers--prices increase like a rocket, fall like a feather type deal.

Let's see though:

- 1080 TI (2017) = $699 = $845 (22' price counting inflation)

- 2080 TI (2018) = $999 = $1,178 (22' price counting inflation)

- 3080 TI (2021) = $1199 = $1,311 (22' price counting inflation)

- 4080 16GB (2022) = $1199

I don't know when GPU mining really started to popularize, but there was a significant leap in pricing from the 1080 TI and the 2080 TI. When you roughly account for inflation, it's about on par with current pricing.

Looks like they could trim prices to 1080 TI levels, but I don't see that happening unless sales slow a bit.

Also, I'd like to add, I used general Consumer Price Index to figure this out, so it could vary if inflation did not impact the GPU supply, manufacturing, transport, and other influencing factors similarly.

My experience buying my last GPU (1080ti) leads me to fill in the blanks. GPU mining became popular shortly after the 10xx was released. I know this because I couldn't find one in stock and even when I did, it was much more expensive than the launch price.

Both 3080TI and 4080 are roughly 600mm2+ Die Size. 2080 has a 700mm2+ on a mature node.

1080TI, the only outliner in your example has less than 500mm2 of die size.

And all of that are before taking account of GDDR memory costing, the board, higher TDP requirement and heatsink differences.

While I dont think 4080 pricing is good value or cheap by any standard. I also dont think it is ridiculously expensive. From a transistor stand point, you are getting 2.7x the transistor between 3080Ti and 4090. With 4090 You are buying 76 billion transistor, with 24GB of GDDRX for only $1600.

$/transistor could be the biggest variable here. My understanding is that we haven't been seeing this lower even with node shrinks. Analysts have speculated that this is why Xbox released a trimmed down console (series s)- because a cheaper "slim" wasn't realistic. Similarly Sony raised prices because inflation is outpacing their ability to reduce costs.

>$/transistor could be the biggest variable here. My understanding is that we haven't been seeing this lower even with node shrinks.

Purely from a Wafer, Transistor per Die Space hence Cost per transistor, we are still getting it cheaper per node generation. The ratio, cost per transistor may not be dropping "as much" as what we were used to. But it is still dropping.

However the Initial cost for product development on new node is increasing. This fixed cost, ( think CAPEX ) amortised over "fixed volume" would mean the cost per "die" would also be increasing.

So once you add those together you will see we are at the end of the power curve.

Is it actually reasonable to be comparing the TI pricing rather than original version pricing? Are they skipping a TI release this series or something? If not then the launch version table looks like this:

- 1080 (2016) = $599

- 2080 (2018) = $699

- 3080 (2020) = $699

- 4080 12GB (2022) = $899

- 4080 16GB (2022) = $1199

Doubling the price of the flagship version of the launch product over just 6 years is well, a pretty large jump.

Since you didn't account for inflation: blame inflation.

That's non-sense. I omitted inflation data because the parent post had that for similar numbers and did not list the source used. My attempts gave significantly different numbers, so if I gave inflation adjusted numbers, it would be a misleading comparison vs the numbers in the parent's post.

- 1080 (2016) = $599 - 2080 (2018) = $699 - 3080 (2020) = $699

- 4080 12GB (2022) = $899 - 4080 16GB (2022) = $1199

Doubling the price of the ?080 version of the launch product over just 6 years is well, a pretty large jump.

Cannot wait to see if the market bears these prices without ETH mining!

It may not, then the price will come down. The invisible hand of the free market isn't perfect but in the world of GPUs it works fine.

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