5 ms·

That's huge and a big reason why my next GPU will be from AMD. If I can ever get one that is, between scarcity, demand, bots, scalpers, ...it is terrible out th

by podiki 6y ago

That's huge and a big reason why my next GPU will be from AMD. If I can ever get one that is, between scarcity, demand, bots, scalpers, ...it is terrible out there. You can be on a stock watcher Discord and click instantly to still see that it is sold out (and at a huge markup too).

totalZero 6y ago
For what it's worth, Lisa Su said that although AMD had underestimated demand, the tightness should ease up by the second half of this year.
- podiki 6y ago
  I'm sure it'll eventually ease up (there's always a crunch with new GPUs and consoles, plus all the factors of 2020/21), but I don't take AMD's word for much as their early PR on launch availability was hardly good. This was after what we saw happen for Nvidia's launch too. Anyway, there's blame to go around, and these days I'm more inclined to look at how poorly retailers handle it. There are few (or none) backorders or queuing, and sometimes easily gamed systems. Either way they get their money, but it's not a good look. (It is not the end of the world, but annoying and doubly so when so many of us are stuck inside. Certainly much worse problems to have, I know.)
  - ev1 6y ago
    A fairly significant amount of the "easily gamed systems" are actually taking reasonable precautions. Several of the people doing the gaming are escalating it to very stupid heights: dozens of LLCs registered, applied for ASNs, used to hijack large amounts of IP space and hijack Comcast/Verizon/etc IP space to place fraudulent orders. There is a huge amount of CFAA or worse stuff that needs prosecuting - it isn't just bots placing orders, it's mass amounts of hacked machines and hacked phones being used as proxies and cookies stolen for a valid fingerprint/less CAPTCHAs, wire fraud and forgery of documentation being accepted (instead of RPKI/proper filtering) Anyone that has a slightly popular (at all, really) will get shady requests asking to "install a SDK" or "buy your extension" which installs malware on your end-users devices. This is the slightly legal/grey area part. The other part is where AFRINIC recently revoked a /14 for fraud that was nearly entirely used for proxies and abuse by a 1 person US company, based on WHOIS remarks, obtained fraudulently.
    - podiki 6y ago
      Sure, there will always be people out to make a (not so quick?) buck. Having sufficient supply, and thus not being able to scalp for profit, would help. But something as simple as backorders and a queue would help too, as that would tamper demand and need to go to resellers. I think it is utterly absurd that in looking for a new AMD card in the US, there's nowhere I can order and just wait. (One exception I found was Provantage, back from the ol' mail catalog days. I have an order with them but the product has since been removed from the website. I'm not holding my breath, but maybe one day.)
      - ev1 6y ago
        The people that do this are using queues - by registering hundreds of thousands of accounts from compromised proxies and signing up for the Newegg raffle on all of them, and queuing up for every possible product on all of them. Some sell sets of cookies that you load into your browser after carting, or they check out for you.
- dralley 6y ago
  Second half of 2021 is rather unsatisfying, although I understand why. Ultimately if this generation isn't going to be available in quantity until nearly 7 months post-release, I don't see much reason why I shouldn't just skip this generation entirely.
  - radium3d 6y ago
    This may be a good idea. Wouldn't this delayed release of the current generation give the engineers additional time to improve and iterate on the following generation before release?
  - NineStarPoint 6y ago
    I personally see no reason to believe the next generation isn’t going to suffer from similar supply issues. As I understand it there just isn’t extra bandwidth at the manufacturers, it’s less that AMD and Nvidia underestimated demand and more that they couldn’t have gotten more throughout at a reasonable price point. Presumably at some point more factories will start up to close the gap, but (again as I understand it) between COVID slowdown and how difficult modern computer manufacturing is extra throughput could be a few years off.
nanidin 6y ago
> If I can ever get one that is, between scarcity, demand, bots, scalpers My advice, assuming you're on HN with a technical background, is to create your own bot for monitoring product availability on your store of choice. It's a pretty small investment of time, and it frees you up from the time spent watching a Discord or refreshing store pages manually. Set it up to poll at a reasonable frequency, set up some form of push notification, and find that it's not that hard to get ahead of the horde who are all relying on someone else to do the dirty work for them. Signed, Someone who got a launch day 3090 from the Nvidia store
- reilly3000 6y ago
  What would you consider a reasonable frequency?
  - nanidin 6y ago
    Once per minute when you're close to an expected release of product, once per 3-5 minutes when you don't have a great reason to believe that inventory will be added. My goal is just to mimic me sitting at my laptop refreshing a page trying to buy something as soon as it becomes available, so that I can use my time for something better.
- jowsie 6y ago
  I'm not dismissing your idea, but the fact you managed to purchase a 3090 on launch day seems more like survivorship bias than anything else.
  - nanidin 6y ago
    You have a good point, because I did fail to get a 3080, but I didn't start automating until after the initial 3080 launch. On the other hand, I did get a 1080ti several months after launch during the crypto-boom of 2017 using the same approach. I have also stumbled upon lots of "we added more tickets to X event" type situations before they are announced on social media and disappear in an instant (think sold out music festivals and concerts).
- 6y ago
foobarian 6y ago
Something I don't get, both in case of Nvidia and PS5 products, is why they don't open the sales with higher prices. They are basically leaving at least 2x the money on the table to scalpers.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Interesting question. I believe nVidia once had a policy of deliberately crippling the double-precision performance of their regular consumer graphics cards, in an effort to push their high-end computation-friendly 'workstation' cards, but that's not quite the same thing. Not a rock-solid source, but: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/why-include-fp64.199352/ https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/why-include-fp64....
- 2sk21 6y ago
  Right, why not just conduct auctions?
- Volundr 6y ago
  Personally I've always wished they'd just do backordering, especially with the PS5. Pre-orders sold out? That's fine just let me get in a queue instead of having to check back constantly and try to race for one. I think that alone would kill the scalper market.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    I don't think it would, people would still be willing to pay more to cut the line.
    - Volundr 6y ago
      Probably some, but I'm not sure it'd be enough to maintain a market. All my friends I game with seem to think they'd prefer just being able to back-order to the current system, and clearly basing market predictions based on myself and my friend group couldn't be wrong :-).

by podiki 6y ago

totalZero 6y ago

For what it's worth, Lisa Su said that although AMD had underestimated demand, the tightness should ease up by the second half of this year.

podiki 6y ago
I'm sure it'll eventually ease up (there's always a crunch with new GPUs and consoles, plus all the factors of 2020/21), but I don't take AMD's word for much as their early PR on launch availability was hardly good. This was after what we saw happen for Nvidia's launch too. Anyway, there's blame to go around, and these days I'm more inclined to look at how poorly retailers handle it. There are few (or none) backorders or queuing, and sometimes easily gamed systems. Either way they get their money, but it's not a good look. (It is not the end of the world, but annoying and doubly so when so many of us are stuck inside. Certainly much worse problems to have, I know.)
- ev1 6y ago
  A fairly significant amount of the "easily gamed systems" are actually taking reasonable precautions. Several of the people doing the gaming are escalating it to very stupid heights: dozens of LLCs registered, applied for ASNs, used to hijack large amounts of IP space and hijack Comcast/Verizon/etc IP space to place fraudulent orders. There is a huge amount of CFAA or worse stuff that needs prosecuting - it isn't just bots placing orders, it's mass amounts of hacked machines and hacked phones being used as proxies and cookies stolen for a valid fingerprint/less CAPTCHAs, wire fraud and forgery of documentation being accepted (instead of RPKI/proper filtering) Anyone that has a slightly popular (at all, really) will get shady requests asking to "install a SDK" or "buy your extension" which installs malware on your end-users devices. This is the slightly legal/grey area part. The other part is where AFRINIC recently revoked a /14 for fraud that was nearly entirely used for proxies and abuse by a 1 person US company, based on WHOIS remarks, obtained fraudulently.
  - podiki 6y ago
    Sure, there will always be people out to make a (not so quick?) buck. Having sufficient supply, and thus not being able to scalp for profit, would help. But something as simple as backorders and a queue would help too, as that would tamper demand and need to go to resellers. I think it is utterly absurd that in looking for a new AMD card in the US, there's nowhere I can order and just wait. (One exception I found was Provantage, back from the ol' mail catalog days. I have an order with them but the product has since been removed from the website. I'm not holding my breath, but maybe one day.)
    - ev1 6y ago
      The people that do this are using queues - by registering hundreds of thousands of accounts from compromised proxies and signing up for the Newegg raffle on all of them, and queuing up for every possible product on all of them. Some sell sets of cookies that you load into your browser after carting, or they check out for you.
dralley 6y ago
Second half of 2021 is rather unsatisfying, although I understand why. Ultimately if this generation isn't going to be available in quantity until nearly 7 months post-release, I don't see much reason why I shouldn't just skip this generation entirely.
- radium3d 6y ago
  This may be a good idea. Wouldn't this delayed release of the current generation give the engineers additional time to improve and iterate on the following generation before release?
- NineStarPoint 6y ago
  I personally see no reason to believe the next generation isn’t going to suffer from similar supply issues. As I understand it there just isn’t extra bandwidth at the manufacturers, it’s less that AMD and Nvidia underestimated demand and more that they couldn’t have gotten more throughout at a reasonable price point. Presumably at some point more factories will start up to close the gap, but (again as I understand it) between COVID slowdown and how difficult modern computer manufacturing is extra throughput could be a few years off.

nanidin 6y ago

> If I can ever get one that is, between scarcity, demand, bots, scalpers My advice, assuming you're on HN with a technical background, is to create your own bot for monitoring product availability on your store of choice. It's a pretty small investment of time, and it frees you up from the time spent watching a Discord or refreshing store pages manually. Set it up to poll at a reasonable frequency, set up some form of push notification, and find that it's not that hard to get ahead of the horde who are all relying on someone else to do the dirty work for them. Signed, Someone who got a launch day 3090 from the Nvidia store

reilly3000 6y ago
What would you consider a reasonable frequency?
- nanidin 6y ago
  Once per minute when you're close to an expected release of product, once per 3-5 minutes when you don't have a great reason to believe that inventory will be added. My goal is just to mimic me sitting at my laptop refreshing a page trying to buy something as soon as it becomes available, so that I can use my time for something better.
jowsie 6y ago
I'm not dismissing your idea, but the fact you managed to purchase a 3090 on launch day seems more like survivorship bias than anything else.
- nanidin 6y ago
  You have a good point, because I did fail to get a 3080, but I didn't start automating until after the initial 3080 launch. On the other hand, I did get a 1080ti several months after launch during the crypto-boom of 2017 using the same approach. I have also stumbled upon lots of "we added more tickets to X event" type situations before they are announced on social media and disappear in an instant (think sold out music festivals and concerts).
6y ago

foobarian 6y ago

Something I don't get, both in case of Nvidia and PS5 products, is why they don't open the sales with higher prices. They are basically leaving at least 2x the money on the table to scalpers.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Interesting question. I believe nVidia once had a policy of deliberately crippling the double-precision performance of their regular consumer graphics cards, in an effort to push their high-end computation-friendly 'workstation' cards, but that's not quite the same thing. Not a rock-solid source, but: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/why-include-fp64.199352/ https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/why-include-fp64....
2sk21 6y ago
Right, why not just conduct auctions?
Volundr 6y ago
Personally I've always wished they'd just do backordering, especially with the PS5. Pre-orders sold out? That's fine just let me get in a queue instead of having to check back constantly and try to race for one. I think that alone would kill the scalper market.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  I don't think it would, people would still be willing to pay more to cut the line.
  - Volundr 6y ago
    Probably some, but I'm not sure it'd be enough to maintain a market. All my friends I game with seem to think they'd prefer just being able to back-order to the current system, and clearly basing market predictions based on myself and my friend group couldn't be wrong :-).