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When important components become scarce: CPUs, GPUs
- monkeydust 6y agoIf (like me) your on a long waiting list to get a new Nvidia GPU or AMD processor this piece sheds some light on the issue from a supplier perspective.
- 2sk21 6y agoI need a PC at some time and was thinking of waiting until the new year to get it but it looks like it might actually be a very long wait even in 2021
- post_break 6y agoSo far the only way I've seen people get one is by standing outside microcenter before they open. My friend is doing that just this moment. He snagged me a 3060ti, he's probably about to get another GPU for himself. The bots online have been ridiculous and scalpers see blood in the water.
- Jaygles 6y agoOver 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 techniques to get each piece of their machine, not just the critical components. Scalpers are magnifying the issue. The scalping problem will be solved eventually when supply catches up, but the longer that takes, the more stock the scalpers will obtain, thus prolonging the time window scalping will be profitable. I didn't know what I signed up for last month when I decided to do a build but I sure as hell wasn't expecting this. I only need the GPU now so at least the end is in sight.
- jrockway 6y agoI 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 of other non-Seasonic units I've had over the years. I was plagued with flakiness with a Corsair 1000W unit many years ago. I wasted so much time debugging that problem; finally connecting an oscilloscope to the 12V rail and noticing that the 12V rail fell to 10V when running AVX instructions. That explains why the computer just hard powered off when I hit an AVX workload :) ECC memory was also in a bad state then, so I suffer with non-ECC memory. So far, that is also treating me well. Can't worry about bit flips you don't know about! (taps forehead)
- BlueTemplar 6y agoYeah, 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...
- jrockway 6y agoI've had consistently bad luck with memory, though I never went out of my way to check which chips the module was using, or whether the modules were on my motherboard's QVL. I did both of those things with my most recent build and things are working better than usual. I haven't heard of a lot of problems with power supplies causing bad memory; usually the memory itself is just bad. RMA that stuff and re-roll.
- theandrewbailey 6y agoI wanted a new GPU so I could run Cyberpunk 2077. Turns out that even people with those GPUs are having issues, so by the time I find one, the game should be sufficiently patched. I have a massive Steam backlog, so I'm not too frustrated.
- bserge 6y agoHave 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.
- kingosticks 6y agoBut 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!).
- deadbunny 6y agoIt's literally impossible to kill hardware with standard overclocking these days.
- kingosticks 6y agoFor obvious reasons I have zero intention of trying to prove you wrong.
- gizmo385 6y agoIf 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 :)
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- kyriakos 6y agoI find Nvidia GPU's in Europe in stock on retailers often, 3060/3070 mostly but the prices are 500 to 700 euro - well above the recommended retail price.
- csomar 6y agoIt's interesting because I live in Tunisia (which has lots of challenges for importing stuff, one of them is lack of foreign currency) but the new Ryzen series is widely available including the 5950x. You can find it in most of the gaming suppliers (like this one https://skymil-informatique.com/processeur-amd/3357-amd-ryzen-9-5950x.html https://skymil-informatique.com/processeur-amd/3357-amd-ryze...). The RTX series are also available, though I'm still waiting for AMDs. Do you they have per-country quotas?
- mjevans 6y agoI just want to enter a global waiting queue where the actual supply is raffled or rationed out by a lottery of sorts. E.G. mid-November AMD confirms all the parts will exist and opens pre-orders; I enter for the CPU and GPU I want. Based on how many weeks go by unfulfilled I get that many spots in the drawing. A new batch clears customs in my country. Sequential drawings are run until the requested parts are depleted. I am sent a token from AMD that I can use at a retailer to buy the indicated stuff
- est31 6y agoReally 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 production is therefore not possible. > A special insulating film, the so-called ABF substrate (Ajinomoto Build-up Film), which is indispensable for etching chips in 7 and 5 nm, has also become increasingly scarce and scarce in recent months. The prices for this film are said to have risen by 40% and the waiting time is said to have increased to up to 4 months.
- monkeydust 6y agoThe 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/index.html?videoId=6094577755001 https://players.brightcove.net/6050660078001/default_default...
- 0-_-0 6y agoWow, very dramatic move about an insulating material!
- ljoshua 6y agoHa, this is the best thing I've watched in a while. :)
- rav 6y agoI 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!
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- kzrdude 6y agoI'd like to hear more from companies, not consumers, that can't get the computers they want. How do they manage? More reuse? I traded up my computer at work, but it turns out they had to give my old one to a new employee due to shortages.
- vmchale 6y agoI don't know if this counts but I want an ARM laptop performant like the M1 but with Linux (not from Apple?)
- wyldfire 6y agoThere's a few vendors shipping Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx / SQ2 laptops. Surface Pro X, Lenovo Flex 5G, Acer Spin 7, etc. They definitely won't be head-to-head with M1, but they're probably your best bet for a high-performance ARM linux laptop.
- wyldfire 6y agoReplying to myself because I'm too late to edit it: From March 2020: "The Surface Pro X Should Scare Apple" [1]. The headline looks pretty amusing in hindsight. Apple entering this market will likely validate Windows-on-ARM as a strategy. Microsoft made a pretty strategic blunder by not working to make sure a Chrome port could be available on the first generation, but it was available on the second generation Windows-ARM laptops. [1] https://onezero.medium.com/the-surface-pro-x-should-scare-apple-80e802d159f2 https://onezero.medium.com/the-surface-pro-x-should-scare-ap...
- segfaultbuserr 6y agoI started wondering as soon as Apple M1 was announced. Under a comment about porting Linux to Apple Silicon [0], citing the lack of official support and documentation, my closing remark was > Unless the circumstances change and indicate otherwise, I think the Apple Silicon [Linux] port will be a serious waste of community time, talents, and resources. It's better to spend time on a platform where vendor support and documentation exists... However, the conclusion assumes that a serious competitor of Apple Silicon will eventually emerge and more supportive to the community, but it won't necessarily happen. I'm somewhat afraid that biting the bullet and reverse engineering the Apple Silicon could be the only way to have a high-performance Linux desktop on ARM - I hope not. Will there ever be a serious and more community friendly competitor to Apple Silicon in the next five years? And if so, who is it going to be? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25250600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25250600
- ehejsbbejsk 6y agoIsn’t it really the semi industry unwilling to invest because they don’t want to get burned just a couple of years down the road. I just don’t see this demand lasting.
- macintux 6y agoDiscussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25457411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25457411
- victor106 6y ago> 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 and that there is no inflation and one of the justifications to keep rates low. If this is not inflation then what is?
- Enginerrrd 6y agoI thought they explicitly said they are letting inflation run above the target value for a short period of time in order to average out to the target value since it was allegedly so low for so long. (Personally I'm not sure that it is, due to CPI changes and the like, but that's another debate.)
- 0xCMP 6y agoDon't think it's relevant to the fed because it's clear there is an actual supply chain shortage which is being exaggerated by much higher than normal demand. Hence the low rates are not causing that. In fact raising rates would make it harder to borrow to increase production or to pay for the now more expensive components.
- gruez 6y ago>So we are told by the FED and that there is no inflation and one of the justifications to keep rates low. If this is not inflation then what is? Because inflation/cpi is measured using a basket of goods. pc parts being inflated by 25% doesn't mean there's 25% inflation overall. That said, the the money printing/ZIRP did cause inflation, it's just that it was mostly in assets, rather than in consumer goods hence why the cpi hasn't budged much.
- frgtmypass 6y agoI 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.
- account42 6y agoIt's also worth mentioning that there have been an unusual high number of tech product launches really close to the end of the year in 2020 where demand is naturally high. Last year AMD had around half a year between launch and shopping season to build up stock - this year it was less than two months with additional competitors for chips launching at around the same time.
- coward8675309 6y agoThe 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 GREATER THAN supply, but supply is — wait for it! — LESS THAN demand! OMG, they've been covering this up the whole time! And not only that, current events and world affairs are contributing to this situation! When will the sheeple wake up?!
- colejohnson66 6y agoYou 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 would make sense that they’d try to fulfill demand. Another big problem is scalpers and websites not doing enough to stop it. They create an artificial scarcity so they can make a quick buck. Sure, a PS5 isn’t “essential” like toilet paper is, but it’s still a dick thing to do.
- coward8675309 6y agoI spent $600 on a PS2 from an eBay-based scalper in 2000. I can only imagine how much more organized and pervasive the practice is twenty years later.
- colejohnson66 6y agoEasy access to code to run your own bot doesn’t help. In 2000, the internet was pretty new, but now, YouTube exists and can teach anyone to set up their own bot for a chance to “get rich quick!”
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- jokoon 6y agoWell 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.
- dragontamer 6y ago> 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 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.
- jokoon 6y agoI 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.
- swiley 6y agoThis would be much easier if they published/maintained drivers for older chips but many companies do not because they "want to protect IP." I would argue most of the "IP" is really just forced API incompatibilities so that most software only works on their devices and anything that isn't is irrelevant to reverse engineering but it doesn't matter, there's surprisingly little money to be made manufacturing things that work well and shocking amount to be made shoving things that barely work down everyone's throats.
- Animats 6y agoIt'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.
- worker767424 6y agoWith 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.
- exged 6y agoThe 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.
- cogman10 6y agoI 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'll ever get to that level in the first place without some really clever engineering. The issue to solve is electromagnetic radiation will induce currents in surrounding conductive material. I really don't know where the industry ends up going when we hit that brick wall. Different materials? More exotic CPU designs? Who knows.
- lucb1e 6y agoAt the risk of asking a stupid question: why have queues instead of raising prices until demand gets nearer to the level of supply? Not that I would want this of course, but I'd also want free bubble gum and the gum companies... they're there to make money. Why not chip makers? I don't see auctioning systems popping up, I see people in in queues for a GPU, "out of stock" pages, and purchase quantity limits being imposed.
- AntiImperialist 6y agoIt's the manufactured scarcity which helps them make money most of the time. They have to create hype and desire and exclusivity... and repeat it indefinitely. They could change out of that cycle now that it's actually scarce... but most of these chip manufacturers are too big to be flexible like that.
- lucb1e 6y ago> They have to create hype and desire and exclusivity That would be the same also with absurd prices right? (See brand clothing, brand phones, brand mice, etc.) It's not as if production increases when prices increase.
- benlivengood 6y agoBecause there's a price war between Intel and AMD for CPUs and between AMD and nVidia for GPUs. Even if they're sold out there will still be preorders and people will preorder the best value.
- lucb1e 6y agoSure, but why bother with preorders and backlogs if you can just sell your product for more money? If one party increases prices they'll get fewer sales, but if the product isn't available to begin with that doesn't matter (up to a point). I can see the appeal of having the money before you have to produce the product (due to preordering) but it doesn't seem beneficial for the bottom line.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoI can't manage to read this right now and skimming doesn't get me the answer I want and an internet search doesn't either. But I can't help but wonder how much precious metal bottlenecks factor into this. I did find this piece: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/covid-19-causes-major-disruption-in-precious-metals-market-301062823.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/covid-19-causes-maj...
- lazylizard 6y agowhy can't ppl wait? its not like nvidia is making only 1000 rtx cards.