NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series Graphics Cards Expected to Launch Sooner than Expected, Will Be Built on TSMC’s 5-Nanometer Process

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I really f*cking miss when cryptocurrency mining wasn't even a thing that existed.

I have enjoyed using my old cards to make some extra side change but I don't even remotely think it's worth the price of what we're experiencing now. I agree with you. I'd be much happier if it didn't and we could all enjoy our tech w/o all this insanity.

On the flipside proof-of-stake for ethereum is around the corner. The major downside is that type will likely just make it so the rich get richer since those who have the most get the most and everyone else gets left behind. However, it's difficult to say if another proof-of-work coin won't move in to fill the void.

 

[Zarathustra]

I have enjoyed using my old cards to make some extra side change but I don't even remotely think it's worth the price of what we're experiencing now. I agree with you. I'd be much happier if it didn't and we could all enjoy our tech w/o all this insanity.

On the flipside proof-of-stake for ethereum is around the corner. The major downside is that type will likely just make it so the rich get richer since those who have the most get the most and everyone else gets left behind. However, it's difficult to say if another proof-of-work coin won't move in to fill the void.

Honestly, I feel about crypto, the same way I felt about .com's in the 90's.

Back then I thought the hype of .com's was ridiculous. Sure I liked the tech, and saw that it had great promise, but saw straight through the facade, and realized that these companies might hvae a website but they weren't using that technology for anything that created value, and that most of them were useless. The tech will surely be important somehow some day, but certainly not these fools, and something is going to have to change first.

I hate to pat myself on the back but I think young teenager me hit it pretty spot on.

Crypto feels the same way. The blockchain type tech is interesting, but most if not all of these cryptocurrencies are really not going to amount to anything, and great things are going to have to change if any of them will. Right now calling them "currencies " is mostly a sham, as their value is just driven from hoarding due to FOMO.

Something might change eventually, but all of this mining is just consuming tons of resources, and upsetting established markets for no good reason. It's making some people some money, but that's just because they are passing off the results to others before we all have a realization of how useless they all are, and the crypto-bubble bursts,

It's a real shame.

 

[Armenius]

Tip for Nvidia - stockpile for 6 months prior to release. In the mean time, rake in the cash from the 3k series.

The first tape out on TSMC's 5nm was back at the beginning of 2019. Apple's new phones are using it, I believe. It is possible that NVIDIA have been stockpiling for a while now.

 

[Zarathustra]

The first tape out on TSMC's 5nm was back at the beginning of 2019. Apple's new phones are using it, I believe. It is possible that NVIDIA have been stockpiling for a while now.

That would help, but in all honesty, they could end the problem now if they wanted to.

1.) AMD/Nvidia could require AIB's to have no large volume sales other than to end retailers
2.) As a condition of sale, a contract is signed with the retailer to achieve positive identification of all customers, and have a "max 3 units per customer" type of policy.

Sure, miners could do the Ephedrine Smurf thing meth cookers used to do, but it likely would seriously cut into their profits and not be very effective. They are only cornering the supply today because they either outright sign mass volume deals directly with the AIB's or they are buying up supply with bots. Have a positive customer identification scheme in place and you end the latter. The volume sales is a matter of choice. They either make it or they don't, and thus far they have.

In the end - however - the supply restriction is on the fab side, not on the video card side, so if they do this, they will likely just find themselves competing with others, maybe ASIC manufacturers for the same fab capacity at TSMC and Samsung and we may find us back here again with short supply as AMD and Nvidia can't get fab supply.

It takes 5-10 years and billions of dollars to get a cutting edge fab online, and it is really technically challenging (just look at what happened with Intel's 10nm. If even Intel can screw it up, it is a real challenge) Globalfoundries and others have just given up on cutting edge fab tech, because it is too difficult.

Unless something changes to reduce demand for mining (crypto crash?) and other purposes, I think this problem is unfortunately here for the long haul.

The tech economy has gotten used to readily available latest node fab supply, but the explosion of mobile and IoT and crypto mining, as well as an increased demand for PC gaming parts in the last 5 -10 years has put a huge strain on this supply, at the same time as it is more difficult than ever to actually make these nodes work.

The "Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America Act (CHIPS)" bill might be helpful in this regard if it passes, but it doesn't seem like it is enough given the extreme expense and difficulty to develop fabs, and even if it passes, results from it are 10 years out.

 

[Armenius]

That would help, but in all honesty, they could end the problem now if they wanted to.

1.) AMD/Nvidia could require AIB's to have no large volume sales other than to end retailers
2.) As a condition of sale, a contract is signed with the retailer to achieve positive identification of all customers, and have a "max 3 units per customer" type of policy.

Sure, miners could do the Ephedrine Smurf thing meth cookers used to do, but it likely would seriously cut into their profits and not be very effective. They are only cornering the supply today because they either outright sign mass volume deals directly with the AIB's or they are buying up supply with bots. Have a positive customer identification scheme in place and you end the latter. The volume sales is a matter of choice. They either make it or they don't, and thus far they have.

In the end - however - the supply restriction is on the fab side, not on the video card side, so if they do this, they will likely just find themselves competing with others, maybe ASIC manufacturers for the same fab capacity at TSMC and Samsung and we may find us back here again with short supply as AMD and Nvidia can't get fab supply.

It takes 5-10 years and billions of dollars to get a cutting edge fab online, and it is really technically challenging (just look at what happened with Intel's 10nm. If even Intel can screw it up, it is a real challenge) Globalfoundries and others have just given up on cutting edge fab tech, because it is too difficult.

Unless something changes to reduce demand for mining (crypto crash?) and other purposes, I think this problem is unfortunately here for the long haul.

The tech economy has gotten used to readily available latest node fab supply, but the explosion of mobile and IoT and crypto mining, as well as an increased demand for PC gaming parts in the last 5 -10 years has put a huge strain on this supply, at the same time as it is more difficult than ever to actually make these nodes work.

The "Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America Act (CHIPS)" bill might be helpful in this regard if it passes, but it doesn't seem like it is enough given the extreme expense and difficulty to develop fabs, and even if it passes, results from it are 10 years out.

Both of those approaches will hurt NVIDIA's bottom line, so they will never do that.

 

[Zarathustra]

Both of those approaches will hurt NVIDIA's bottom line, so they will never do that.

Agreed.

Unless they are playing the long game and want to build up goodwill with customers now for a time when we don't have the same supply constrictions / extreme demand we do today. That seems highly unlikely though. They'd rather just pay lip service to the whole problem.

My point was to show that they COULD do it if they wanted today, but they don't want to. It is not in their interest.

 

[Endgame]

Agreed.

Unless they are playing the long game and want to build up goodwill with customers now for a time when we don't have the same supply constrictions / extreme demand we do today. That seems highly unlikely though. They'd rather just pay lip service to the whole problem.

My point was to show that they COULD do it if they wanted today, but they don't want to. It is not in their interest.

It’s in their interest to charge miners more than gamers, because miners will pay more. The interesting question will be how will they implement that.

if Samsung is going to be making the 3 series for a while, NVidia can just start kicking out only 3060 leaving gamers a gen behind while they sell 4k cards to miners as CMP cards, or they could produce 4k cards at LHR and probably at the 4060 level and tell miners to keep buying 3090s.

 

[Denpepe]

Maybe they can start selling cards trough the Valve or EGS store to people with an active account, valve already ships hardware, and limit to one per account.

I haven't heard much on Linus's "scam" of selling cards to real gamers lately, but that was a decent idea though you are still not sure the cards don't end up on fleabay.

 

[Brian_B]

It’s in their interest to charge miners more than gamers, because miners will pay more. The interesting question will be how will they implement that.

Well, to that end, if Person A is willing to pay $, and Person B is willing to pay $$$, for the exact (or near exact) same thing, why would you even bother with Person A?

Miners will never pay more than gamers so long as gaming GPUs are capable of mining. GPUs will get sold for "market value", be that by AIBs or scalpers or whomever, and if that's too much for gamers, or anyone else, to justify, they will just have to do without.

It does tick me off, there are a lot of things storefronts could do to alleviate the situation - but none of them, past public relations, are incentivized in the least to really implement any of them past a token attempt in the name of public relations. My righteous rage does nothing to change the situation, unfortunately.

The problem right now is that crypto mining has the illusion of scaling with no ceiling. If each GPU can net you X amount of profit.. then 100 GPUs nets you 100x profit, and 1,000,000 GPUs nets you 1,000,000x profit. That's a problem with the valuation of crypto right now, and it won't be an indefinite condition - it can't be, because there aren't infinite resources in the world to fund all of that.