why is there a gpu shortage but nothing eles?

[Intoxicus]

The shortages effect everything.
There is all sorts of stuff that's harder to get now.

GPUs have an additional demand due to mining that takes that shortage to a whole new level.

It's only recently that PS5 and Series X have been obtainable and in stock at all.

[trag1c]

10 hours ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

They can't. There's a global chip shortage affecting basically every industry. For example, there's thousands of cars sitting in lots because they can't get hold of chips they need to complete them.

Some of them are starting to downgrade the features on their vehicles so they can start selling them. GM for example has removed a lot of features on their trucks like auto stop/start simply because they can't get the IC's required. I think the only automanufacturer not affected is Toyota because they had the foresight to stockpile components before this all began. 

[minibois]

51 minutes ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

Call me boring but I want to know what's constraining supply of printers.

To be truly honest, I don't know what is going on behind the scenes with printer manufacturing, I just know it has been tough for stores to keep any significant stock of any type of printer (particularly anything in the sort of  $50-300 range, that a consumer might buy).

I think it just has to do with an increase in people buying these things and them just not being able to push up the manufacturing, for a fear of putting too many printers in the market.

 

Maybe it is more similar to webcams, where previously a store sold maybe a couple dozen a week to suddenly selling all of them within a week or so

[CerealExperimentsLain]

Just now, minibois said:

To be truly honest, I don't know what is going on behind the scenes with printer manufacturing, I just know it has been tough for stores to keep any significant stock of any type of printer (particularly anything in the sort of  $50-300 range, that a consumer might buy).

I think it just has to do with an increase in people buying these things and them just not being able to push up the manufacturing, for a fear of putting too many printers in the market.

 

Maybe it is more similar to webcams, where previously a store sold maybe a couple dozen a week to suddenly selling all of them within a week or so

Yeah that's what I'm thinking.  For the longest time 'I don't need a printer anymore, it's paperless, if I ever really need one, I'll just buy one.' then suddenly everyone needed a printer.

 

I have a Canon MX922 I got, that even does optical disc labeling, for like 50bux used, but that was before March 2020 happened.

[WkdPaul]

2 hours ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

Call me boring but I want to know what's constraining supply of printers.

Cyan, the printers are out of cyan ...

https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/system32comics/printers/viewer?title_no=235074&episode_no=42

[CerealExperimentsLain]

1 minute ago, wkdpaul said:

Cyan, the printers are out of cyan ...

https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/system32comics/printers/viewer?title_no=235074&episode_no=42

I once had to find a sorta 'Konami Code' for an old HP printer, a legit combination of various face button presses in correct sequence, to put it into 'Black Ink Only Mode'.

 

Thank god people document things like that online.

[thrasher_565]

13 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

Theoretically, yes, if you were able to get custom software onto the machine. But it's cooling capacity probably isn't the best compared to a discrete GPU and it wouldn't really scale up (you'd need one system per GPU rather than multiple GPUs per system). So price/performance probably wouldn't be attractive, if you could figure out how to run mining software on it in the first place.

wasn't there some thing of hooking up 100 ps3 to do something with? dont remember what but thow

[minibois]

7 minutes ago, thrasher_565 said:

wasn't there some thing of hooking up 100 ps3 to do something with? dont remember what but thow

Ah yes PS3 clusters, who doesn't remember that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

I am pretty sure some PS3 game had their server running on a PS3 cluster too.

Of course Folding@Home was also a thing on PS3.

 

And who can forget the concerns people had, with some nefarious organizations getting their hands on a whole bunch PS2's, to make a weapon of mass-destruction (somehow): https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about-weaponized-consoles-almost-sunk-the-ps2

[KhakiHat]

There is huge shortage in more than just the GPU market, superconductors I'm pretty sure are in a huge shortage(that screws up the entire electronics industry). But outside of GPU sales, I think there is a small PSU shortage going on, and I read somewhere that there is a newer crypto currency utilizing storage devices so be prepared for that XD

[NineEyeRon]

Lots of things are affected, car production is a well known example. GPUs are just well known to the community and exacerbated by mining demand.

 

Lots of commercial products that use chips are having issues in their production and supply chains.

[ryao]

20 hours ago, adarw said:

why is it that companies can still make cpus and other components but not gpus? thanks!

Intel has its own fabrication plants while AMD is able to build more CPUs at the expense of their GPUs.

 

Intel was reportedly having production shortages last year, but given how much marketshare AMD has taken from them, that is probably not an issue anymore.

 

You might ask why AMD would want to cannibalize GPU production in favor of CPU production. It is simple. The CPUs are more profitable. If I recall, the die area used by a RDNA2 GPU is >6x the die area of a Zen 3 chiplet. AMD also doesn't get anywhere near the full price of a graphics card for each one that sells (as the PCB and all of the other stuff on the PCB cost plenty of money), while they get near the full price of a CPU for each one that sells. Lets say that they keep 70% for each CPU sold and 30% for each GPU sold. Then they can either sell 6 Ryzen 5 5600X processors (for example) for a grand total of $299.00 * 0.7 * 6 = $1255.8 in income, or 1 RX 6800 XT for $649.00 * 0.3 = $194.7 in income. You could adjust the numbers to take into account different factors, but the end result will be that CPUs are far more profitable than GPUs thanks to AMD's chiplet design. Taking into account things like defect rates are just going to skew things in the favor of making CPUs look even more profitable than my napkin math shows.

 

Anyway, these numbers put the CPUs over 6 times more profitable than the GPUs. Which do you think AMD would rather produce when they have a limited amount of wafer capacity at TSMC?

 

Interestingly, the Steam Hardware Survey seems to confirm that there are few if any RDNA2 GPUs making it to market since not a single one is listed:

 

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

 

My math indicates that this means that less than 720,000 RDNA2 GPUs are in machines that run Steam. Meanwhile, approximately 4.2 million 30 series GPUs are in machines that run Steam. It is fairly obvious from this that AMD's GPU production is low compared to Nvidia's when you consider how long RDNA2 has been on the market versus Ampere. This supports the notion that AMD is cannibalizing the supply of their GPUs to increase CPU production.

 

As for why Nvidia's graphics cards are out of stock, plenty of people were holding out for the 30 series after the disappointing 20 series. If you have been watching steam's hardware survey, you should have noticed that other GPUs are losing userbase while the 30 series is gaining. In short, everyone wants it now and production cannot keep up, so it is sold out. The cryptocurrency miners loving Nvidia GPUs for their high memory bandwidth this generation are not helping either, but the market has been starved so long for updated GPUs that demand is high even without them. You also have increased demand from the pandemic for new equipment and the stimulus check funds that a number of people decided to spend on new PC hardware (that they can't get), which further increased demand.

 

My suspicion is that Nvidia is producing GPUs faster than they ever have, but it is not enough. Unfortunately, I do not have access to historical steam hardware data to be able to make an educated assertion confirming that and I doubt Nvidia would be willing to tell us. I also recall reading some remarks where a Nvidia employee claimed that increasing GPU production would not increase graphics card production since the production of board components is not able to keep up, so there is also that acting as a limiting factor.

 

That being said, there are shortages of microcontrollers and many other chips across the industry, although they are not consumer facing. This is in part thanks to the automobile industry scaling back orders last year only to expect the capacity to be waiting for them. Other companies had reserved it and the automobile manufacturers are now fighting to regain as much capacity at the expense of others as they can, which is why microcontrollers and other miscellaneous components are in short supply. That and everyone is ordering more parts than they need, excerbating things, thanks to the description of a shortage and uncertainty in the US-China trade war. Chinese firms are stockpiling on chips to ensure that they will have a supply of them if they are cut off while everyone else is stockpiling on things because of the shortages. A company I know placed orders for the next 2 or 3 years worth of chips that they use because of the shortage.

[Ravendarat]

I work in a consumer electronics situation and I can tell you that damn near everything electronic has been in short supply. Try buying a car radio right now thats from a reputable brand, very short supply. Tvs seem to be kinda picking up but for months many of them were scarce, even some smaller accessories have been hard to get a hold of.

[thrasher_565]

seems to me there alot missing from amazon as well. alot of chines pc parts seem missing? maybe of the tarrefs? and alliexspress is unusable its is some other language.

 

anything left on amazon seem to have gone up in price and there even less on ebay even use stuff. people are probably board and buying everything up?

 

could also be the shipping problems too.

[CryingWimp]

There is still a shortage of Zen3 Ryzen 9s, a lot of the older stuff had bulk inventory already, plus people want the fancy new thing.

 

Mining is causing GPU shortages more than other components because miners run up to 12 GPUs on a single motherboard/CPU with 8GB of ram.

 

Basic components can be made using less fancy factories that can't be used to make the fancy stuff.

 

There was a PSU and motherboard shortage when mining took off and throughout the peak. Now that mining profits have come way down, PSUs and motherboards can be found for decent prices again.

 

Everyone still wants GPUs, so the supply can't meet the significantly higher demand for GPUs compared to other components yet. Even many gamers decided to have more than 1 GPU to make a few extra $ mining.