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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 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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]