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There are many reasons for investors to buy chipmakers Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, but the recent rush for an indirect way to play skyrocketing cryptocurrencies bitcoin and ethereum should not be one of them, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Friday. "One of the reasons why AMD and Nvidia have been going up is their chips are used for mining, for cryptocurrency mining," Cramer told "Squawk on the Street." But he warned, "Do not play it for this is what I'm saying. But it is being played for that." [...] Cramer cited a recent note from RBC Capital Markets, which said the growing cryptocurrency mining market has contributed $100 million worth of GPU sales for Nvidia in the past 11 days alone. "AMD chips are the best ones for the ethereum platform," he added.
As we look at the sales channels today, AMD Radeon graphics cards from the current and previous generation of GPU are nearly impossible to find in stock, and when you do come across them, they are priced well above the expected manufactured suggested retail price.
This trend has caused the likes of the Radeon RX 580, RX 570, RX 480, and RX 470 to essentially disappear from online and retail shelves. This impact directly hit AMD products first because its architecture was slightly better suited for the coin mining task while remaining power efficient (the secondary cost of the mining process).
But as the well dries up around the Radeon products, users are turning their attention to Nvidia GeForce cards from the Pascal-based 10-series product line and we are already seeing the resulting low inventory and spiking prices for them as well.
http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-rx-vega-excellent-price-performance/
For mining heavy users, the source further claims that Polaris will continue to feature best price to power consumption ratio. A Vega graphics card that uses the same foundation and form factor as the Radeon R9 Nano is also expected but that's yet to be confirmed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 25 2017, @05:22PM (1 child)
AMD hasn't made its own chips for a decade. Other companies own the chip foundries. The same for nVidia.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fishybell on Sunday June 25 2017, @05:58PM
That doesn't mean video card manufacturers are building chips. They still still have to buy the chips from AMD/Nvidia, and AMD/NVidia still won't increase production for this bubble, meaning cryptocurrency miners will still either have to wait or spend way too much for the cards.
That said, as long as there is still less than a year for the card to pay for itself the cards, people will still buy them at absurd prices.