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An interesting exposition on the lies of demand

cheyanecheyane Member LegendaryPosts: 9,101

Comments

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,355
    Let's point out his mistakes:

    1)  Nvidia isn't meaningfully limited on how many GPUs they can make.  Rather, their limit is on how much memory they can get to feed the GPUs they make.  They have to fight with AMD over GDDR5 and HBM2, but they're the only company in the world that uses GDDR5X.  Of course, their GDDR5X controller is awful at Ethereum mining, so that might not do them much good.

    2)  GPUs that are shifted to mining variants couldn't necessarily have been used for gaming cards.  If the video decode block is defective, or if something in the fixed-function graphics hardware is defective, you can't necessarily use that for a graphics card.  It's fine for mining, though.  Additionally, if at least three compute units are defective, a GP102 chip can't meet any available bins of GeForce cards, though they could have made a lower bin between a GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti if they wanted.  Still, this doesn't particularly matter because of (1).

    3)  Making an ASIC for a particular cryptocurrency is not necessarily a trivial thing to do.  From the power/performance numbers on Bitmain's upcoming Ethereum mining ASIC, it's plausible that it could be GPUs inside.  Only the price tag says otherwise.

    Still, his broader point that Nvidia is categorizing GeForce GPUs that miners bought for mining as being "gaming" sales is obviously correct.  What happened in Q1 to spike GPU sales upward had nothing to do with gaming and everything to do with cryptocurrency prices spiking so far upward that, not content with buying all of the AMD GPUs, the miners started buying Nvidia GPUs for it, too, in spite of them being far worse at performance per dollar if the cards were at MSRP.
    kitaradOzmodan
  • kitaradkitarad Member LegendaryPosts: 7,919
    Interesting points @Quizzical and insight

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