While arguing about the potential fates of various cryptocoins is obviously engaging, I found this video by Gamers Nexus to be very interesting.
The cost increase isn’t just directly caused by mining. There’s some indirect effects and there are some other serious issues.
- Mining has drive up price
- Memory prices have also caused a large percentage of the problem. ($30 increase in component costs to board makers - before it gets marked up to consumers - normally board makers expect memory prices to fluctuate by $5 per quarter
- Several manufacturers think Nvidia could provide more GPUs but they are not asking for more
- Significant concerns from manufacturers on being left with a lot of product on hand if the mining market crashes. Since ramping up takes a few months they are too concerned about unsellable product if mining crashes and floods the market with cheap cards between now and then.
What do you think AIB partners (aka, who was providing these answers) would tell you?
The reality is quite different.
The AIBs are selling GPUs by the pallet to (serious) miners.
The AIBs are the direct reason for the entire situation.
The majority of the GPUs never even make it to retailers, since the primary leaking channel to miners is at the AIBs themselves.
The only viable solution is for Nvidia to decrease AIB allocations and to increase the allocation for their 1st party web store as well as opening web stores in every region (they only have a US one right now).
Essentially what happens in the case of Nvidia is that Nvidia sells most of their chips to the AIBs, then sells some of their chips directly to mining equipment manufacturers, and then manufactures a small amount of their own reference cards to sell at their own web-store and at places like Best Buy.
Due to the fact that Nvidia is afraid of alienating the AIB partners, Nvidia cannot meet the demand from gamers that the AIBs are supposed to fulfill since the AIBs are selling the majority of the cards directly to miners instead of doing their jobs.