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Big shot across the bow of Nvidia - the whole 30-series stock problems seem like a big miscalculation right now. Granted it’s still early as this is just announ
by taurath 6y ago
Big shot across the bow of Nvidia - the whole 30-series stock problems seem like a big miscalculation right now. Granted it’s still early as this is just announced, so no real world benchmarks, but their 3090 competitor coming in at $500 under Nvidia makes it a really tough sell - not that a lot of people have even gotten them at this point. Rumors of Nvidia making TI versions in literal months after the 30-series launch are probably true.
- overcast 6y agoWhen has there ever been enough stock on highend GPUs?
- bcrosby95 6y agoYes. The exception was when bitcoin prices went crazy and miners were buying them all up.
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoThat was mostly limited to AMD cards though.
- diab0lic 6y agoRight but if you're a gamer and you wanted an AMD card and can't get one because of crypto demand you'll buy an Nvidia card, thus causing demand to spike. Obviously it didn't spike as high as AMD but consumers will feel the shortage if demand spikes over supply, which happened in this case.
- colejohnson66 6y agoNvidia as well made “crypto mining” cards that were just a mainline card without video output. I recall a video by LinusTechTips who attempted to get video output from one of them. Edit: Here’s the video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4
- onli 6y agoThere was a time period where pretty much the only gpu you could get was a GTX 1050 Ti. At first it was only AMD cards, right, but things changed after a while.
- Macha 6y agoI seem to remember the 1070/1070ti/1080 being affected too. The lower and higher end (1060/1080ti) were the main ones to escape
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoObviously YMMV but as an example, I don't remember it being that hard to get my 980Ti back when it was somewhat new.
- Tuna-Fish 6y agoIt's not just that there is not enough to meet the usual demand, the supply is definitely much lower than typical. I see numbers for a major European distributor network, and there is maybe a fifth of the supply of what there was for the 2000 series, same time after launch. Something is very definitely wrong.
- quantummkv 6y agoNvidia's issues might have to do with the yield issue on the new and untested Samsung 8nm process. But AMD is on the tried and tested 7nm TSMC process. I doubt they will have the fab issues, given that Apple's move to 5nm would have freed up a lot of capacity for AMD to use.
- Miraste 6y ago> new and untested Samsung 8nm process. It is not new and untested, it's been in use since 2018.
- kllrnohj 6y agoIt's been used since 2018 for smaller, power optimized designs. This would be the first significant high performance design, and at comparatively huge die sizes. Also claimed the process was semi-custom for nvidia, not the "standard" 8nm. Unclear what exactly was different, though, but depending on the changes (if any) it may actually not be yielding as well as a 2 year old process should
- zimpenfish 6y agoCurrently at day 41 of waiting for my 3080 card in the UK.
- deeeeplearning 6y agoAppears to be some evidence that most of the 3xxx cards were bought out by bots. Most sites were sold out more or less instantly and there's now a large supply available on ebay/amazon/etc for way over retail prices.
- vkou 6y agoAs a shareholder and a capitalist, I am deeply disappointed that NVidia is leaving hundreds of dollars of profit per card on the table, by allowing scalpers to pick it up. But on a serious note - why are they doing so? Surely, they have good predictions of supply and demand - why are EBay resellers reaping the profits from the gap between the two? Why aren't these cards retailing for $1000, with price reductions happening as demand drops below supply?
- potiuper 6y agoNVidia does not sell the cards direct, the retailer does. Retailer does not want to deal with that much volatility in price as customers would demand refunds, so it is left to the scalpers to take on the supply risk. It is surprising that the retail version of the cards are available upon release as is and not dedicated for a period of time to OEMs - Apple, Alienware, etc. (volume customers) negotiated for guaranteed supply at premium rates.
- snvzz 6y agoConsidering how bad Ampere lineup is against AMD, particularly when price taken into consideration, these scalpers are going to lose money. They need to sell the cards at higher than official price to make money, which is going to be hard. And I do not feel sorry for them.
- mdoms 6y agoBefore Bitcoin stock was rarely a problem.
- bart_spoon 6y agoDeep learning, cryptocurrency, and the resurgence of PC gaming have all taken place over the last decade, so its hard to pin production issues on any single factor. Personally, I think its less due to these and more due to people using bots to buy up stock for scalping. The same stocking issues have happened for the new Xbox and Playstation, and even for non-tech hardware, like the newest Warhammer 40k box set. The bot scalping issue is just becoming more pervasive.
- saberdancer 6y agoAdd Covid-19 to the list, lot of people at home. Another aspect is VR which needs as much hardware as you can give it.
- thrwyoilarticle 6y agoAlso 1440p was largely ignored, so in a jump from 1080p to 4K there's a massive increase in demand from the hardware. And at the same time, we want better refresh rates than ever. 4 times the pixels and 3 times the frames isn't easy!
- saberdancer 6y agoI recently moved from 1080p 16:9 at 60Hz to 1440p 21:9 at 160Hz. 6 times the amount of pixel/frames. One of the reasons why performance isn't stellar even though I bought 3080 at the same time. Most games can't run anywhere near 160 fps.
- freeflight 6y agoPrior to the big cryptomining/ML hypes. Back then these highend-GPUs used to be prestige projects that mostly existed for the marketing of "We have the fastest GPU!", the real money on consumer markets was made with the bulk of the volume in the mid-range.
- m463 6y agoRight before a new generation comes out?
- tomerico 6y agoAddressing the price difference between RTX 3090 and 6900 XT: 3090 is priced at $1500 for its 24GB RAM which enables ML & Rendering use cases (Nvidia is segmenting the market by RAM capacity). AMD's 6900XT has the same 16GB of RAM as 6800XT, with less support on the ML side. Their target market is gamers enthusiasts who wanted the absolute fastest GPU.
- athorax 6y agoAgreed, the 3090 is definitely meant for ML, but my guess is people are largely buying it for gaming purposes.
- llampx 6y agoWouldn't the Titan series be more meant for ML?
- colejohnson66 6y agoI thought Quadros were meant for non-gaming workloads and the Titans were just more powerful than the top-tier mainstream/gaming card? Or have things changed?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- andoriyu 6y agoYes, Quadro was for non-gaming workloads. Titan meant a different thing with every new iteration. Some were explicitly "non-gaming card that you can play games on" other were "got tier gaming card". RTX Titan for example was not as good in FP64 calculation compared to RTX Quadro. While first Titan was good at both. Nvidia kept changing what Titan means in order to extract most amount of money without hurting Quadro sales. Even at its peak certain things were software limited for Titan, but not for Quadro. Nvidia has tons of artificial limitations for each of their graphics card once you go beyond gaming.
- 6y ago
- quantummkv 6y agoBut will even the TI versions work here? A 3090TI or 3080TI for example would have to launch at the most at the same price as their base models to stay competitive. That would result in a massive PR headache. Also, would the TI versions actually help? Even a 100$ markup on a 3080TI would bring it close to the 6900 XT pricing. And the 3080TI cannot come close the 3090/6900 XT performance for that markup or otherwise it would risk cannibalizing Nvidia's own products. Nvidia's only hope at this point is that either AMD fudged the benchmarks by a large margin or AMD gets hit with the same inventory issues.
- dannyw 6y agoNVIDIA can resort to paying developers to only optimise for NVIDIA performance and/or cripple AMD performance.
- snvzz 6y agoI wouldn't put it past NVIDIA considering their scummy history[0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0L3OTZ13Os https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0L3OTZ13Os
- dathinab 6y agoThey kind of do that anyway in a slightly more roundabout way then you described. (In the way they use their devs to help AAA games to fix some issues under some circumstances, there had been cases where optimizations speed up Nvidea but hindered AMD due to architectural differences but, surely it was all accidentally).
- lini 6y agoBut will game studios do it now that both next gen consoles use AMD's RDNA 2 chips?
- rasz 6y agoThey already implemented this plan 20 years ago, "Nvidia, the way it's meant to be played!" means things like: https://techreport.com/news/14707/ubisoft-comments-on-assassins-creed-dx10-1-controversy-updated/ https://techreport.com/news/14707/ubisoft-comments-on-assass... "Radeon HD .. gains of up to 20%.... Currently, only Radeon HD 3000-series GPUs are DX10.1-capable, and given AMD’s struggles of late, the positive news about DX10.1 Ubisoft’s announcement about a forthcoming patch for the game. The announcement included a rather cryptic explanation of why the DX10.1 code improved performance, but strangely, it also said Ubisoft would be stripping out DX10.1 in the upcoming patch Ubisoft decided to nix DX10.1 support in response to pressure from Nvidia after the GPU maker sponsored Assassin’s Creed via its The Way It’s Meant To Be Played program." https://techreport.com/review/21404/crysis-2-tessellation-too-much-of-a-good-thing/ https://techreport.com/review/21404/crysis-2-tessellation-to... "Unnecessary geometric detail slows down all GPUs, of course, but it just so happens to have a much larger effect on DX11-capable AMD Radeons than it does on DX11-capable Nvidia GeForces. The Fermi architecture underlying all DX11-class GeForce GPUs dedicates more attention (and transistors) to achieving high geometry processing throughput than the competing Radeon GPU architectures." GameWorks slowing down ATI/AMD users by up to 50% https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/05/amd-says-nvidias-gameworks-completely-sabotaged-witcher-3-performance/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/05/amd-says-nvidias-game... https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/03/10/the-witcher-3/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/03/10/the-witcher-3/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- llampx 6y agoI am a huge AMD supporter and recently bought their stock as well, but in terms of competition to NVIDIA for non-gaming purposes they have lot of ground to cover. NVENC for example is great for video encoding and supported in a lot of video editing programs. I use AMF in ffmpeg but from my understanding, NVENC is faster and with the 3000 series, better quality. Same with CUDA vs ROCm.
- subtypefiddler 6y agoIt's not just CUDA vs ROCm, ROCm has come a long way and is pretty compelling right now. What they lack is the proper hardware acceleration (e.g tensor cores).
- porphyra 6y agoROCm has come a long way but still has a long way to go. It still doesn't support the 5700 XT (or at least, not very well) --- only the Radeon Instinct and Vega are supported. You can find salty GitHub threads about this dating to the very start of when Navi was just released: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/887#issuecomment-605711172 https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/887#issueco... And getting ROCm set up is still a buggy experience with tons of fiddling in the deep inner workings of Linux so it is nearly impossible for the average machine learning engineer to use. It is compelling for certain bespoke projects like Europe's shiny new supercomputer, but for the vast majority of machine learning, it is totally unusable. By now in ML world the word "gpu" is synonymous with "nvidia".
- subtypefiddler 6y agoFull disclosure, European here and in our team everyone is found of Linux so not representative of your average MLEngineer. We actually had more issues with nvidia drivers messing up newcomers' machines during updates than with setting up AMD GPUs, but then again n is small (and AMD GPUs were for playing around rather than real work). Still, a Titan Xp has CUDA support and plenty of memory, but it's better, IME, to upgrade to a model with less memory but higher cuda compute and access to tensor cores.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Koliakis 6y agoAdd to that, it's likely they won't have as many supply issues as nVidia because they're using TSMC and TSMC is totally on the ball when it comes to yields (unlike Samsung).
- jonplackett 6y agoI was thinking this too - is this really just another TSMC victory - like it is with AMD on TSMC vs Intel still not making it to 10nm, and Apple making gains on A14 (soon to be compared VS intel no doubt) - it's the process that's driving efficiency for sure. How much is this one really about TSMC 7nm vs Samsung 8nm?
- carlhjerpe 6y agoI find it interesting that this isn't brought up more often. And it's also rather impressive that Intel isn't further behind. Then again, I'm rooting for AMD all the way until they become the new evil.
- redisman 6y ago> A14 (soon to be compared VS intel no doubt) Isn’t A14 a “5nm” process chip? Why would it be compared to intel and their 14nm++++?
- jonplackett 6y agoI mean it will be compared by Apple, when they launch their new apple silicon macs and want to show off how much faster their chips are than previous Intel - likely taking all the credit, when a large part is down to TSMC's 5nm process.
- Jenya_ 6y agoThe 5nm process from TSMC could be less of a success, as say Anandtech editor on Twitter (his A14 review incoming) https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/jjwtjy/andrei_fanandtech_on_twitter_5nmn5_looks_to_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/jjwtjy/andrei_fan...