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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: 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.