5 ms·
PC Hardware can come from an Era with so many manufacturers and true-actual fierce competition, resulting in complete commoditisation of components. However, no
by dagaci 5y ago
PC Hardware can come from an Era with so many manufacturers and true-actual fierce competition, resulting in complete commoditisation of components. However, now in 2022, there are only 2 CPU vendors,2 GPU vendors and even with storage the number of manufacturers is small. Only TSMC can deliver 5nm and Mr Cook has all that capacity on lock (AMD and Intel will get a look only when he is done with it)
Mining like with politics is just some easy target to blame, the problem is Monopolies and duopolies.
Events have catalysed a market rife with monopolies and duopolies: these rule the supply chain, they have seen the true prices the market will accept, how can we expect prices to go back to "normal"?
- jcranmer 5y agoI walked into a computer store last night. There were shelves full of CPUs and SSDs and HDDs, and buying several of them at once would have no one batting an eye. Yet there was a policy: only 1 graphics card per customer per month, and that applies solely to graphics cards (and prebuilt computers containing graphics cards). In other words, there is visibly a shortage of graphics cards that is not affecting any other components. That strongly suggests that there is something driving demand for graphics cards that is not driving demand for other key components of computers, which are available in sufficient supply. And the list of things that extra demand could be coming from is rather short indeed.
- aNoob7000 5y agoWas is MicroCenter? I've seen the same thing at the store near my house.
- jcranmer 5y agoYes.
- dagaci 5y agoI waited 6 months for delivery of my CPU, then immediately had to wait for the RAM.. HEDT woes..
- jrockway 5y agoYeah, I couldn't find ECC memory when I was building my Threadripper workstation mid 2020. I ended up with consumer-grade memory which was ridiculously cheap, however. (I think I got 128GB for less than $400.)