21–30 of 219 posts
In the long run, explosion in demand for GPUs will help lower prices and push the technical envelope for enveryone, including the gamers complaining in this article.
I'm legitimately worried about the long term future of my hobby (PC gaming) at this point. Prices like this have a cascade effect because when less people can afford to build a PC and/or upgrade there's less incentive for developers and publishers to spend time on the platform. Consoles are shielded by the ability of Sony and Microsoft to take losses which will be absorbed by online fees and higher game prices but no…
I imagine they are also shielded to some extent by being AMD APU-based, so the market for discrete GPUs has less of an effect.
Maybe there's something I missed about GPUs and mining, but how can an amateur rig like these hope to keep up with ASIC rigs? Can you profitably mine with residential electricity and GPUs still? How long can that possibly last?
Bought some cards during the Christmas break season and prices/availability were fine. I was surprised when I went to buy some more and saw the prices! I reason that if crypto currenices crash I can re-purpose my nice new collection of GPU's to do Deep Learning training. It's got me pondering how one could do a distributed deep-learning training as the proof-of-work for a crypto-currency. Then the POW would be doing…
I'm legitimately worried about the long term future of my hobby (PC gaming) at this point. Prices like this have a cascade effect because when less people can afford to build a PC and/or upgrade there's less incentive for developers and publishers to spend time on the platform. Consoles are shielded by the ability of Sony and Microsoft to take losses which will be absorbed by online fees and higher game prices but no…
Having worked in a Fab and an assembly factory, there is a tremendous amount of coordination that needs to happen. Let's forget the business aspects for a moment - in order to ramp up production, it is not just building more lines. Silicon industry supply chains are mind bogglingly complex from oil-free-air supply hardware, etching chemicals supplier, automation equipment all the way to the copper mine. All of these interdependent supply chains have to scale in perfect coordination without an exception to be able to scale production.
Then there is the business side - building more lines could be foolish investment if the LRP (long range projections) is weak.
nVidia fabs their chips at TSMC. Say, TSMC has wafers ready but the assembly houses are struggling to keep up - the entire supply chain is broken and demand cannot be met.
Its bad. Its never been this bad before. Just go on pcpartspicker and realize that there are GTX 1080 Tis selling on third party websites for over $1500, and that's the only place you can get them beyond getting lucky. Nvidia isn't going to ramp up production significantly because crypto could crash any day, simultaneously destroying their new sales and flooding the used market with old mining hardware. Combine it wi…
ASICs aren't saving the planet either - people are incentivized to burn up to $BLOCK_REWARD of electricity per block, the number of hashes it takes to do so is irrelevant. If you come up with a better ASIC, people will buy more of them, the network difficulty increases, and you're back where you started. It's just another stage in the Red Queen's Race. The only thing ASICs do is centralize control (because economies…
I am thinking more broadly in terms of thermodynamics. I understand classical Thermodynanamics but I don't understand information entropy well.
From the standpoint of physics, Energy is the ultimate currency and it seems like we are trading it to decrease information entropy. Typically, entropy is the tax when performing work (for e.g in a heat engine) if that process is irreversible. I wonder if this kind of theory applies to Cryptocurrencies?
It's great. Once ethereum etc. crash we can buy used high end graphic cards cheap.
I’m not sure I’d want a card that’s been at full utilization, 24 hours a day, for who knows how long.
I'm legitimately worried about the long term future of my hobby (PC gaming) at this point. Prices like this have a cascade effect because when less people can afford to build a PC and/or upgrade there's less incentive for developers and publishers to spend time on the platform. Consoles are shielded by the ability of Sony and Microsoft to take losses which will be absorbed by online fees and higher game prices but no…
Gamers are complaining about why can't nVidia just ramp up their production. Having worked in a Fab and an assembly factory, there is a tremendous amount of coordination that needs to happen. Let's forget the business aspects for a moment - in order to ramp up production, it is not just building more lines. Silicon industry supply chains are mind bogglingly complex from oil-free-air supply hardware, etching chemicals…
I don't see too much of that in gaming circles. It's understood that it would be risky as crypto will crash sooner than later. The anger in the PC community is almost exclusively directed at miners. Threads about it pop up on the daily, but what can we do? We could lobby NVIDIA/AMD to somehow implement restrictions on what the Gaming SKUs can be used for as they do with the Quadro/FirePro workstation cards, but it's unclear if that would work let alone if it's technically/legally possible.
It's a bad time to be a PC gamer, and just months ago it was a great time to be a PC gamer.
Its bad. Its never been this bad before. Just go on pcpartspicker and realize that there are GTX 1080 Tis selling on third party websites for over $1500, and that's the only place you can get them beyond getting lucky. Nvidia isn't going to ramp up production significantly because crypto could crash any day, simultaneously destroying their new sales and flooding the used market with old mining hardware. Combine it wi…
ASICs aren't saving the planet either - people are incentivized to burn up to $BLOCK_REWARD of electricity per block, the number of hashes it takes to do so is irrelevant. If you come up with a better ASIC, people will buy more of them, the network difficulty increases, and you're back where you started. It's just another stage in the Red Queen's Race. The only thing ASICs do is centralize control (because economies…