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Discrete GPU Sales Plummet to Historic Lows:
If you've been looking at the GPU market recently and thinking, "nope," you're not alone. Jon Peddie Research has released its year-end summary, and it paints a grim picture: Shipments of discrete GPUs have fallen to levels not seen in almost 20 years. It's an unexpected situation given the recent deluge of GPUs in the channel thanks to the death of crypto. Plus AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have released all-new GPUs this year too. Despite the bounty of silicon at their disposal, gamers are just not buying GPUs right now.
[...] The reasons for the steep decline in GPU shipments aren't perfectly detailed in the summary. However, we can make a few guesses. This entire year has seen a rapid slowdown in the PC market as the pandemic began to fade. People went outside again and turned off their PCs. There's also been increasing economic anxiety for most of the year as well. This has been punctuated by mass layoffs at major companies recently, such as Meta and Amazon. Additionally, a lot of PC upgraders held off in the third quarter in anticipation of all the new hardware coming out.
Many people might have examined the new CPUs and GPUs and concluded prices were too high. This issue has affected both AMD on the CPU front and Nvidia on the GPU side. AMD had to dramatically lower Zen 4 prices for Black Friday and has largely kept them in place. Nvidia hasn't lowered prices, but so many scalpers tried to return RTX 4080 cards that Newegg halted refunds for them.
Tom's Hardware summary of the report
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday December 31, @09:52AM (12 children)
What drives GPU sales:
- Gamers
- Cryptocurrency miners
The pandemic lockdowns forced the latter to play even more than usual - and non-gamers to get into gaming - and now that everybody can go out again, even they go out more than they used to.
As for the latter, the various crypto scams are collapsing right and left, and so has the incentive to mine.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31, @10:08AM (10 children)
It's interesting how many people are now saying that Crypto is a Pyramid scomola, not too long ago such a comment would result in "troll" down-mods and excommunication from the forum (particularly Slashdot, which I haven't visited in ages)...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday December 31, @10:40AM (8 children)
It's not a pyramid scheme - or even a Ponzi scheme - in the strictest sense, as many people seem to think. But it shares a lot of characteristics with those classic schemes. That's why it should have been particularly obvious to most everybody from the inception of Bitcoin that a lot of people were going to lose a lot of money at some point if it even became widespread. It did, and they did.
The only silver lining here is that it took long enough to collapse that honest investors saw it coming and pulled out in time (or never gambled to begin with), and the only true losers at the end are overly greedy people who knew exactly what they were in for.
I've been saying cryptocurrencies and NFTs were a scam years before it became fashionable to say so on SN or /., and I've been downmodded countless times. Until recently.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Saturday December 31, @11:57AM (6 children)
It's better described as a classic bubble: The income promise was that you'd find an even bigger sucker to buy the thing, even though it wasn't really worth all that much.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31, @03:10PM
My credit card transactions sure aren't costing the merchant 1 dollar and definitely not $60 (bitcoin transaction charges got about that high before!).
Bitcoin was definitely good as a legal/semi-legal ponzi scheme. But a currency based on "This is worth $$$ because a bunch of us burned lots of energy proving it" is pretty bad by design however you look at it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31, @03:22PM
Speaking of suckers..
https://www.news.com.au/finance/markets/world-markets/cryptocurrency-crash-sees-man-loses-650k-life-savings/news-story/183fef63537f24376a1e465021687df9 [news.com.au]
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/22/ukrainian-man-loses-life-savings-in-stablecoin-crypto-slump [theguardian.com]
https://www.thesun.co.uk/money/18027849/widower-lost-home-life-savings-crypto-scam/ [thesun.co.uk]
https://www.news.com.au/finance/money/costs/melbourne-man-devastated-after-losing-89k-to-three-scam-websites/news-story/ebadea211b30cd5b1eb43866efcb9ca5 [news.com.au]
https://www.news.com.au/finance/money/costs/sydney-mans-plan-to-retire-at-58-backfires-after-epic-crypto-hack/news-story/0ebfe584d7e3c3fe20d6d8c7933a9cf7 [news.com.au]
https://www.news.com.au/finance/money/investing/uk-man-loses-27m-bitcoin-fortune-after-making-simple-mistake/news-story/0befed8cb1d1acbc4c8478f47b55b28f [news.com.au]
https://www.news.com.au/finance/money/costs/trading-website-ibc-exchange-exposed-as-scam-after-qld-man-loses-80k/news-story/0d5a03c41417f5577e98bd25914a8ad0 [news.com.au]
and more.. so many many more..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Saturday December 31, @04:30PM (3 children)
Bubbles are in things like tulips and housing where there is a natural limit to how many there are and how much supply can be added in the near term. BTC in particular was designed to be an infinite good that was distributed in a way that was both finite and had a weird distribution pattern where those that got in early could get it for virtually nothing with further blocks being more and more difficult to mine. That's a pretty big difference and one that puts it far closer to being a variant of the classical ponzi scheme than a natural bubble. In both cases you've got it setup so that the returns are coming purely based on newcomers buying in at inflated prices and their inflated because of the way the scam was set up, not because of any sort of real market forces like with the stock market.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 31, @10:56PM (2 children)
I didn't realize bubbles were an organic thing. You can have bubbles in free range tulips, but not factory farm crypto?
My take is that if there really was an infinite supply of crypto with this many con artists and suckers, then someone would push the magic "make more money" button and produce an infinite supply of such to completely drain all value from the suckers. That they haven't is a solid indication that there is some sort of scarcity in the cryptocurrency markets, artificial or not. Thus, we have the usual bubble market dynamics as expected.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Sunday January 01, @04:38PM (1 child)
It's kind of a fine distinction, but the difference is that with a typical bubble the supply is in some fashion limited and it's demand lone that drives the crazy prices. In terms of crypto you have that, but you also have a currency that's designed not to scale well at all becoming increasingly expensive over time. The result is that even if the demand starts to go back to nothing, you still have an increasing valuation on the coins whereas with the tulips, things would more or less go back to normal when people stopped using large numbers of them as a status symbol.
It is kind of a fine distinction, but I do think that it's a large enough one to justify keeping separate. Probably the closest thing you could have would be if simultaneous to the demand for tulips exploding, somebody started just destroying not just the tulips themselves, but a portion of the farm land necessary to grow them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 02, @01:57AM
Actually, you do not. Valuation is not the cost of creation or use. Otherwise a ditch dug with spoons would be more valuable than a ditch dug with a backhoe. Protip: it is not.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by r1348 on Saturday December 31, @12:31PM
It's a greater fool scheme with a pyramidal development similar to multi-level marketing.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31, @01:27PM
That is not true that those comments would have largely been marked "troll" not long ago. Those comments were made quite often and even up-modded. I can't guess where the balance fell in the pro/con/neutral for crypto, but it certainly wasn't anywhere tilted towards pro.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31, @11:36AM
- I'd add the general level of economic activity
Personally, I'm watching prices of EPDM rubber roofing--it went nuts last year with all the building going on, that part of the economy was superheated. I've got a section of EPDM roof 30 years old that started to leak (and rot the edge of the plywood decking underneath). Hoping my patch holds long enough that prices (and scheduling) come back to earth.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Saturday December 31, @05:08PM (1 child)
The full report is ~350 pages long and sells for $1000 since there's too many caveats behind those lower sale figures:
1. Used miners cards are flooding the market but they're not targeting all price tiers equally.
2. Repurposed mobile AMD chips like the 6600m are being used in discrete desktop cards and end up as the most cost-effective options (look for "6600m" in aliexpress for a nice deal).
3. Consoles and handhelds (like the Steam Deck) sales as well as gaming laptop trends need to considered since we had multiple launches this year.
So, while sales certainly took a dive, it's probably not as bad as an "historic low" and the specifics of AMD's market share losses are probably mitigated by points #2 and #3 to a great extent.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Sunday January 01, @01:59AM
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financial-results-for-third-quarter-fiscal-2023 [nvidia.com]
The crater is only starting to form.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by EEMac on Saturday December 31, @06:30PM (1 child)
nVidia is on record as saying they are intentionally keeping prices high, by limiting supplies of 3XXX cards and overpricing 4XXX cards.
AMD is slightly better but has not made bold moves to oversell/undercut.
Both companies have decided to pursue low sales, high margin. The market is exactly where they want it.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Sunday January 01, @04:40PM
This is why I haven't bought a new GPU in the better part of a decade apart from whatever came in my computer. It's ridiculously expensive and trying to find one that's decent, but reasonable for the money is a lot more work than I care to put into it. I miss when there was a clear way of knowing whether a new component was going to be better than what I already owned without having to do a ton of research.
(Score: 2) by TrentDavey on Saturday December 31, @07:30PM (1 child)
I keep seeing this phrase all over the place.
If it's dead, why is BitCoin still $16,000 +/- $1,000 ?
Shouldn't it be closer to ... well ... $0 ?
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday December 31, @10:57PM
Bitcoin was designed to be inherently deflationary, as a result it's most likely to go to some extremely large value and get stuck there with no further trades as those holding it hold out for higher prices in the future. In the scenario, the value would effectively be zero even though the nominal value would be a ton.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jasassin on Saturday December 31, @08:54PM
They lie. MSRP my ass! I’ve never seen shit like this in my entire life! A GTX 1650 Super I bought for $164 years ago was jacked up to $250 and now they’re trying to sell them for $185?!?
https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-GeForce-Overclocked-Graphics-PH-GTX1650S-O4G/dp/B097Z3HJ76/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?crid=2LWU2BJIV8GS8&keywords=gtx+1650+super&qid=1672519433&sprefix=gtx+1650+%2Caps%2C126&sr=8-3 [amazon.com]
I highly recommend not buying until these people start crying as the stock falls because they inflated the prices to some exorbitant arbitrary number. It doesn’t help AMD is riding the same shit wave Nvidia’s hanging ten on (ask eVGA about what they think of nVIDIA). Let the cards collect dust on the shelves, until they yank their heads out of their arses!
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0x663EB663D1E7F223
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday January 02, @07:50AM (3 children)
When I priced discrete GPUs about a year ago, I was seeing ridiculously high prices. $1000+, for mid range stuff. I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw a low end AMD card that I got around 12 years ago offered for $50. Was the market for GPUs so hot that even decade old stuff had value? Evidently, yes. That was so depressing that I haven't even bothered checking prices since. Prices could've crashed, and I would not know, or really care. I'll stick with integrated graphics, thank you very much.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 02, @08:20AM (2 children)
Integrated graphics are approaching good enough for 1080p, especially with the Xbox Series S in the corner slowing things down for the rest of this decade. Some games may be forced to upscale from 900p to work smoothly on Xbox Series S, but every (flagship) AMD APU from Phoenix Point forward will be more powerful than the Series S. Rembrandt 680M is a little behind it based on theoretical performance numbers:
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/xbox-series-s-gpu.c3683 [techpowerup.com]
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-680m.c3871 [techpowerup.com]
I would consider a discrete GPU to do AI stuff on it, not gaming. Some models that people are using need more than 12 GB of VRAM.
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(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday January 02, @03:03PM (1 child)
Hmm. I have been wondering whether a Raspberry Pi can handle being a movie server. From negative experiences with stick computers, low end tablets, and a Beagleboard, I have doubts. Have had issues with them overheating, and being unable to speedily decode video formats other than MPEG4 because that's the only one that can be decoded in hardware. AV1 hardware decode is, from what I see, still uncommon.
My ancient video card is a Radeon HD 5450, and it's in a PC that doesn't support SSE4. Of course it also does not support Vulkan, DirectX12, and everything else that came out after 2010.
Yes, don't need discrete GPUs for the graphics. As for AI, I have heard there is now neural net hardware designed to work in a PC, but haven't stumbled upon a system that come with that. Unless what they mean is that a graphics card can be that neural net.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 02, @03:29PM
Raspberry Pi could probably handle being a movie server, but I wouldn't get an overpriced one for that purpose, on account of its weird, slow GPU, inconsistent optimization (like needing a specific Chromium build to get hardware acceleration), and other problems. In theory it can do H.265 4K, but no AV1, and not even VP9.
Intel may announce Alder Lake-N a few days from now at CES, the successor to Jasper Lake [wikipedia.org] Atom models. That should have doubled core counts (4 or 8 "E-cores", instead of 2 or 4), and a Gen12 iGPU [wikipedia.org] with AV1 hardware decode which Jasper Lake didn't have.
Alternatively, there is the similar Mendocino from AMD (has AV1 decode), but it's unclear if it will be in the form factors you want at a low price. It has been as low as $300, and the dual-core versions ought to be cheaper, when they materialize.
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