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When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

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Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#61

Post by cbozeman »

mschuster91 wrote: post #45
rob74 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalpers aren't powerful enough to create an artificial scarcity. If there were not really an increased demand for the products, noone would pay their inflated prices. When demand outstrips supply, the logical thing for manufacturers and (e-)retailers to do would be to increase prices themselves to balance out the situation, but for various reasons (one of which is possible negative PR) they are reluctant to do that,…

> Scalpers aren't powerful enough to create an artificial scarcity. Of course they are. Back in ye olde days when GPU mining for bitcoin was still possible (basically, FPGAs were not widespread and ASICs not even on the horizon), the amount of people who bought out all usable GPUs and resold them on ebay was massive . It was almost impossible to get anything for months unless you were willing to pay many multiples th…

> In concert and other event tickets it's even worse. Some tickets have been known to sell at 20x markups, Rammstein concerts or Wacken tickets are usually outsold in a matter of hours and end up on ebay the day after.

That's because there's built-in scarcity by virtue of physical limitations of a venue.

If your stadium only holds 15,000 people, but your city has 11 million or more like, say, the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, you can easily find 15,000 metalheads. Probably an order of magnitude more.

People keep talking about "artificial scarcity" with these GPUs, but its not artificial. The foundries that make these are running at max capacity 24/7. They are trying to get these cards into the hands of the people that want them, there's just simply not enough foundries and capacity available.

There isn't some grand conspiracy in this case. In this case, this is the effect of increasing consolidation of the computer industry as a whole.

Look back the 1980s at the amount of hard disk manufacturers. There were easily 10+ companies... Western Digital, Seagate, Connon, Maxtor, Quantum, etc. Now what are there? Three? Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital?

Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#62

Post by frgtmypass »

victor106 wrote: post #20

> Incidentally, the price per kilo for air transport has doubled worldwide and Europe is increasingly resorting to the new Silk Road, which China has pushed very hard: conventional road and rail transport, the prices of which have even tripled in the meantime! Especially bulky peripherals, such as PC screens, are also suffering greatly: according to a well-known brand, prices rose by 15 or 25% in France, for example.…

I mean, if you believe the FED then you have to just dismiss this as inflation. But I think it's a lot more complicated.

1. Basket of goods doesn't include investment goods. Economists have some fancy schmancy reason for it (basically you get your money back when you sell), but I don't buy it.

increasing monetary mass dilutes the purchasing power of the dollar. No one would argue that inflation doesn't increases the price of financial instruments - everyone correct returns for cpi. But we're correcting the returns with a metric that denies that those instruments can have inflation.

Meanwhile, what have we seen in the past 20 years? Price of housing (not included in the cpi) and financial markets have seen great returns. This despite the '08 financial crisis.

2. Printing money isn't the only thing that affects the price of goods. The cost of producing them does as well. Inflation is hidden by the dismantling of industry.

Well what have we done over the past 30 years? We've outsourced everything to countries that exploit slave labor. So if (as an example) the dollar is half as good, but the price of labor goes from 50% to 10% of the purchasing price, most of the inflation is now masked. Does the CPI track that my 1.1X more expensive sweater was made with slave labor? Or does it just track that the hourly cost of a handyman (local labor) has stagnated?

Meanwhile things that cannot be off-shored have become expensive. My house. My education. My health care.

3. Hidden inflation. It is universally agreed that appliances made today are of piss poor quality. They're poorly made, with cheaper parts, and thinner sheet metal. How do you track that properly?

Food packages have become smaller (rounding down when doing unit conversions is an easy freebie). A 125 g. bag of chips is a 110g. bag of chips.

Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#63

Post by dragonwriter »

victor106 wrote: post #20

> Incidentally, the price per kilo for air transport has doubled worldwide and Europe is increasingly resorting to the new Silk Road, which China has pushed very hard: conventional road and rail transport, the prices of which have even tripled in the meantime! Especially bulky peripherals, such as PC screens, are also suffering greatly: according to a well-known brand, prices rose by 15 or 25% in France, for example.…

> So we are told by the FED

What's that? Do you mean the Fed (short for “Federal Reserve”)

> that there is no inflation

The Fed doesn't produce inflation measures, it consumes them. It's the Bureau of Labor Statistics that produces the data indicating (e.g.) a 1.2% (not “no”) annual inflation by the main headline price index from Nov. 2019 through Nov. 2020.

> If this is not inflation then what is?

It is inflation in narrow specific markets; narrow markets often have rates of inflation very different than the broad aggregate measures. Relative prices of different goods are not fixed. Fed policy response primarily to broad price indexes, not any of the specific narrow markets you point to.

Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#64

Post by BlueTemplar »

monkeydust wrote: post #6
est31 wrote: post #3

Really interesting: > With the exception of the current RTX 3000 (Samsung), all market launches of the year 2020 rely on the 7-nm chips from TSMC. ARM-SoC manufacturers such as Qualcomm also use 7 nm and have only recently moved capacity from Samsung to TSMC. TSMC is currently pretty much alone in the market with this technology and the production lines are therefore working at full capacity. A sudden increase in pro…

The ABF thing is fascinating actually. The company behind it Ajinomoto has for the last century since its existence built a business in food products: seasoning, oils, beverages, dairy products and chemicals. ABF came about through internal innovation. There's a really good (perhaps unintentionally funny) video of it here: https://players.brightcove.net/6050660078001/default_default...

Umami-san!

Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#65

Post by jokoon »

Well maybe stop making them obsolete? Just make software that can either last longer, or can run on slower hardware.

I have been complaining about wirth s law for years now, and the environment requires the industry to adapt.

You cannot add features and features and get each user a new chip every 2 year.

Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#66

Post by BlueTemplar »

jrockway wrote: post #14
Jaygles wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the past three weeks I've had 7 store pages on auto refresh trying to catch a 5950x in stock. I've finally got one on order but it's a pre-order and its earliest ETA is Jan 12th. I guess this gives me time to try and order the GPU I want. It isn't just CPUs and GPUs though. The cooler I want won't be in stock until July per the manufacturer. I had to get lucky to get the PSU I wanted. People are employing crazy…

I built a new machine back in August and the PSU was the hardest part. I tend to only buy Seasonic power supplies, but there just weren't any in stock anywhere. I ended up finding an Asus power supply on B&H and it served me well, but I really hate deviating from my approved vendor list. (So far it has treated me well. It's a 1200W unit and I can pull 1000W from it without any problems at all. The same cannot be said…

Yeah, I'm now happy to have switched my decade-old 400W Corsair to a (perhaps oversized) 750W one just before Covid hit. It didn't solve my RAM issues (memtest just hangs with 2×8 Go, and the PC randomly reboots with 4x8 Go), and so overclocking is still out, but at least I don't have to worry about my PSU anymore...

Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#67

Post by gizmo385 »

deadbunny wrote: post #53
kingosticks wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if it goes (really) wrong, you have nothing until the supply issues are resolved. Sounds like a bad plan right now. Especially if there's a perfectly good Steam backlog to get through (when is there ever NOT a Steam backlog!).

It's literally impossible to kill hardware with standard overclocking these days.

If you're _just_ overclocking, then I think that's safe to say. However, the OP was referring to things like installing new thermal pads and installing hardware mods. That sounds meaningfully more risky to the lifetime of your card :)

Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#68

Post by dragontamer »

jokoon wrote: post #65

Well maybe stop making them obsolete? Just make software that can either last longer, or can run on slower hardware. I have been complaining about wirth s law for years now, and the environment requires the industry to adapt. You cannot add features and features and get each user a new chip every 2 year.

> You cannot add features and features and get each user a new chip every 2 year.

Except we can.

Video games continue to get more graphical enhancements: and people continue to want to buy stronger GPUs (Raytracing, VRS, etc. etc.) so that its possible for them to see these improved graphics.

Be it high-framerates for esports, or 4k graphics, or virtual reality, or raytracing. Video gamers have always pushed for better-and-better.

There's nothing wrong with being excited for these new features. It probably sucks to reprogram these engines every few years to take advantage of these features... but that's a job lol.

There are plenty of video-game developers who don't care much about the latest-and-greatest graphics. Instead, they build a "retro" look and try to compete on gameplay alone. That's also good and fine (and I usually tend to buy these games instead).

But I don't think there's anything wrong with someone out there being excited for say... Minecraft Raytracing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_4QaWbntUQ

-----------

I mean, they're games. They're supposed to innovate and excite us in new ways. They're entertainment. Some developers choose the graphical route, others choose gameplay. Nothing wrong with that.

Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#69

Post by Animats »

It's a real problem. There's a worldwide shortage of high-end fab capacity. That's not an easy business to enter. TSMC is spending US$20 billion on their newest fab. They started in 2018, and they expect to get parts out in volume in 2021 or 2022.

If you want to duplicate TSMC, you'd need a huge amount of money. TSMC is valued at around US$500 billion. Anyone not already a major fab operator would probably fail. They'd have to go through several generations of fabs to catch up. Meanwhile, TSMC is moving forward. China is trying to catch up.

There's never been an industry like this before, where it costs half a trillion dollars to be a player. Not just to be #1, but to even be in the game.

Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#70

Post by octoberfranklin »

rav wrote: post #18
monkeydust wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ABF thing is fascinating actually. The company behind it Ajinomoto has for the last century since its existence built a business in food products: seasoning, oils, beverages, dairy products and chemicals. ABF came about through internal innovation. There's a really good (perhaps unintentionally funny) video of it here: https://players.brightcove.net/6050660078001/default_default...

I feel like this is the kind of video they would show to every employee on their first day at work, and to every school class that wants to pay them a visit at their factories. And it's really entertaining too!

The reenactment of him being "summoned by his boss" at 3:20 is hilarious.

7:19-7:41 is another funny scene.

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