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When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

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Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#91

Post by exged »

worker767424 wrote: post #79
Animats wrote: post #69

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…

With all of Intel's problems right now, this current shortage is a good chance to halfway catch up since they at least have their own dated fabs.

The shortage is actually a direct outcome of Intel's problems. Historically Intel had by far the highest capacity for leading edge fabrication processes - just for their own CPU production. It didn't make sense for companies like TSMC to invest in additional fabs as long as Intel had the lead. AMD taking the lead and moving ~25% of x86 CPU production to TSMC is a huge shift.

Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#92

Post by HenryKissinger »

cogman10 wrote: post #84
Animats wrote: post #69

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…

I suspect this problem is only going to get worse. Each node shrink has come at incredible costs and there does not look to be any path towards decreasing those costs. Eventually, there's simply going to be no ability to shrink. After all, we have a lower limit of single atoms. They have a radius of around 0.06 -> 0.5 nm. That's not terribly far from the current state-of-the-art processes of 7nm. Further, I doubt we'…

7nm for eternity. The wheel has never been improved upon.

Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#93

Post by raducu »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #28
coward8675309 wrote: post #26

The paranoid conspiratorial tone of TFA is a symptom of what's wrong with the Internet and therefore humanity: > The big brands that are ultimately at stake (Sony, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD) all talk about “demand exceeding supply”. Oh, really? [New paragraph.] It is a rather evasive explanation, without any communication about the actual state of their supply and production lines… The dark secret? Not only is demand GR…

You mentioned this briefly, but: I think the big problem is the stay-at-home orders combined with massive improvements in technology results in tons more people wanting to upgrade immediately than initially expected (based on previous releases). It wouldn’t make sense for Nvidia to produce less than the demand on purpose because that results in less money. If we take the view of companies want to maximize profit, it…

Just my own tin-foil observation: the prices of components in much demand tens to remain much higher than the original anounced price for years. Scalpers cannot account for that. Surely Nvidia is actually chatging premium prices as well and blames it on scalpers and unexpected demand. Nvidia just tricks the world with the low announced price, bates and then switches, realtors do that all the time.

Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#94

Post by thaumasiotes »

vlovich123 wrote: post #41
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,…

Your argument seems to be scalpers don’t have power because OEMs could just raise the price themselves and get all that scalp profit. That’s good in theory but in practice you have complex sales channel configurations and contractual agreements. If Best Buy is selling your GPU at $400 because that’s the agreed upon MSRP, they’re going to be pretty unhappy if they’re out of stock and suddenly you decide to increase MS…

> in practice you have complex sales channel configurations and contractual agreements. If Best Buy is selling your GPU at $400 because that’s the agreed upon MSRP

Just to be clear, you cannot contractually obligate a vendor to sell your product at the MSRP. (Or any other price.) That's the whole reason the term is "manufacturer's suggested retail price".

Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#96

Post by BlueTemplar »

mschuster91 wrote: post #86
BlueTemplar wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This must mean that these concert tickets aren't being sold at market prices to start with... Now, a much worse situation is for critical health products, like what happened with masks and hydroalcoholic gel during the start of Covid. Not surprising that the governments intervened and made scalping of that illegal, and relaxed some rules on their fabrication. (But on the other hand the governments did some "scalping"…

> This must mean that these concert tickets aren't being sold at market prices to start with... The "market" is more than just the price of goods sold, it's always also the environment. Events have to at least show some level of affordability for the common man or public backlash occurs. Hardly anyone would go to a soccer match if the starting price for the ticket was in the four-digit range, any band that dared to p…

I guess what they could do is to sell concert tickets as named lottery tickets, that way :

- they can keep the price of an individual ticket relatively cheap

- fairness is preserved

- they probably would still get more money than now, while scalping would be basically infeasible

Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#97

Post by jokoon »

dragontamer wrote: post #68
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 bett…

I think it can be done without having to obsolete previous hardware. I'm not saying to stop performance improvement, just that it could be done more responsibly, to avoid a system of growth and short lifecycle for profit motives.

Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#98

Post by bserge »

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.

Admittedly I haven't tried anything newer than a GTX 1070, but on most cards you can softmod or hardmod the voltage to dangerous levels, enough to burn some VRM components or the GPU itself. It's quite fun :D

Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#99

Post by bserge »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #43
bserge wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried overclocking the everloving shit out of your current card? I mean throw everything at it, best thermal paste/pads, cooling, hardware mods. Genuine question, as that's what I do before deciding to buy a new, well, anything :D Surprisingly, it works pretty well... A few burned out GPUs and motherboards over two decades seems like a good risk/reward ratio.

A Radeon 7970 will only do so much. I'm not sure if it even has enough vram. If anything, I'd rather run it in potato mode before overclocking. > A few burned out GPUs and motherboards over two decades seems like a good risk/reward ratio. I'd rather keep my old equipment in working order to resell or donate.

It can go pretty damn far, though. 20-40% extra performance is noticeable. But yeah, memory size and throughput can be a serious bottleneck.

Re: When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs

#100

Post by cogman10 »

HenryKissinger wrote: post #92
cogman10 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect this problem is only going to get worse. Each node shrink has come at incredible costs and there does not look to be any path towards decreasing those costs. Eventually, there's simply going to be no ability to shrink. After all, we have a lower limit of single atoms. They have a radius of around 0.06 -> 0.5 nm. That's not terribly far from the current state-of-the-art processes of 7nm. Further, I doubt we'…

7nm for eternity. The wheel has never been improved upon.

Honestly, that will probably end up being what happens. Once node shrinks are exhausted we'll see efforts poured into improving yield and using better materials. It will be less about getting smaller and more about refining everything.

Once the node shrinking stops, that's when you are likely to see R&D funds go away from manufacturing processing and towards chip and architecture design. Because that's the only place you'll see improvements is a more well designed chip.

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