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How can this be? GPU manufacturers are unhappy that demand for their GPUs is skyrocketing, so they are trying to make GPUs that are less in demand? That makes z
by mquander 9y ago
How can this be? GPU manufacturers are unhappy that demand for their GPUs is skyrocketing, so they are trying to make GPUs that are less in demand? That makes zero sense to me.
Why would a GPU manufacturer prefer that an end user use their GPU for games rather than cryptocurrency mining?
- psyc 9y agoThey are absolutely thrilled about the demand, and very reluctant to bank on it going forward.
- raverbashing 9y ago> Why would a GPU manufacturer prefer that an end user use their GPU for games rather than cryptocurrency mining? Because one is a fad the other is their major customers (though the market for ML is growing and nVidia is investing there as well)
- ThomPete 9y agoNext year that one is a 10 year fad.
- raverbashing 9y agoIt will be fun when people realize "ASIC resistant cryptos" are anything but
- GeneralMayhem 9y agoPerhaps they don't believe that GPU-based mining will be profitable enough to sustain the industry. In that case, they need to do everything they can to keep the PC gaming market alive, so that they have someone left to sell to when the cryptocurrency market crashes.
- maldeh 9y agoIn addition to dealing with a vast surplus of used cards on any secondary markets if the crash gets bad enough. It would be rather convenient for them if older miner GPUs were quickly made 'incompatible' with the needs of the consumer gamer / PC market.
- saint_fiasco 9y agoPrice discrimination, maybe?
- dsacco 9y ago> Why would a GPU manufacturer prefer that an end user use their GPU for games rather than cryptocurrency mining? They don’t prefer anything in particular, they’d just like to keep both markets. They can bifurcate the market and earn more from each demographic rather than let one dominate the other by inefficiently adapting gaming cards to homelab supercomputing. In one scenario, they let things continue and the mining market reduces supply for the gaming market, which makes their overall market share more brittle. In the other scenario, they increase the volume of cards purchased by gamers, securing that market, while selling more optimized, higher cost mining cards to miners. This has the added benefit of product diversity.
- magila 9y agoManufacturers don't like cryptocurrency miners because they don't have any brand loyalty and may not be in the market for a new GPU a year from now. As for why they don't just make more cards: The volatility of cryptocurrencies makes manufacturers hesitant to ramp up production. They are afraid of being stuck with an oversupply of cards if the bottom falls out of the market.
- sosuke 9y agoWhat if AMD or NVIDIA would take preorders for cards. Then they could ramp up to demand exactly right?
- zrm 9y agoIt wouldn't work unless everybody including the gamers were willing to preorder a year or more in advance, because if the bottom fell out of GPUs for cryptocurrency then everyone who preordered for mining would immediately turn around and resell them and flood the market.
- stormbrew 9y agoAs the price of video cards goes up to meet high demand for gpgpu use they may actually lose sales for gaming use. Ideally they would sell to both markets at prices appropriate to each, which could earn them more in the end. Given that they use pretty different interfaces to the cards this seems pretty feasible.
- ben-schaaf 9y agoThe GPU manufacturers aren't actually making that much more money AFAIK. They apparently have a lot of contracts with suppliers that have fixed pricing. Sure, demand is increasing, and the manufacturers are selling pretty much every new card they make, but until they increase production they aren't making that much more money. Increasing production takes a fair amount of time and money, and with the volatility of the cryptocurrency market it seems like a risky investment. You can see the effects of this: Nvidia is selling their GPUs at close to MSRP on their website with a set limit on the amount you can buy per customer. If they're making bank on cryptocurrency mining why would they hurt their sales by doing that? To me that move only makes sense if Nvidia wouldn't be making a lot of money otherwise and highly valued their current gaming customers.
- floil 9y agoNvidia's gross margin is north of 60%. They want to sell GPUs. It seems more likely that they're trying to segment the market so that they can charge miners, gamers, and deep learning customers different prices; the per-customer limits are a way of accomplishing this, since gamers don't need to buy in bulk like the other two.
- dmitriid 9y agoNvidia doesn't make the hardware. They make designs. Other companies (for example, Asus) make the actual GPUs
- dtech 9y agoThey buy the chip from Nvidia directly.
- mastax 9y agoNvidia does make hardware. Sure its more common to see a third-party card in a boutique or homebuilt PC Gaming computer, but Nvidia does make and sell cards which are very common in other places. Large PC vendors will use first-party cards (Apple, Dell/Alienware, HP/Origin). Workstation cards are almost all first-party. Compute, ML, and embedded products are all first-party.