Ampere Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/MSI-nv...olen-china

In a sad turn of fate, 40 cargo boxes of RTX 3090's were stolen from MSI's factory in China this morning, amounting to $336,500 worth of stolen graphics cards. MSI has notified the police regarding the matter and posted a reward of 100,000 Yuan ($15k) for anyone who has useful information regarding the RTX 3090 cargo boxes' whereabouts.

MSI's communications on the matter indicate that the factory's shipping area is covered by video surveillance. The company also frequently inspects the trucks that come in and out of the campus. As a result, MSI believes an insider stole the cards. MSI also offers clemency for any participant that steps forward, provided they help locate the stolen items.
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Luckily, this shouldn't upset the market too much. After doing some quick math, the amount of RTX 3090's missing comes to around 220 units, which isn't a lot. But that means there will be a deficit in MSI RTX 3090 SKUs if these cards were headed to your location. But luckily, this is just a single batch, and none of the other AIB partners had cards stolen.

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/31806...tory-heist

This is the second issue for MSI in recent months that involved inventory allocation ending up somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be. Back in early October, the company took heat for the fact that one of its subsidiaries, Starlit Partner, was selling MSI RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 cards for well above MSRP, even as these GPUs were sold out at Amazon and Newegg.

We have no information on whether the two incidents could be related in any fashion. In one case, an OEM partner somehow gained access to GPUs it should not have been allowed to resell and then sold them far above MSRP, but this could be explained by anything from an inventory system error to an inside decision to “accidentally” funnel some cards to a company that shouldn’t have been allowed to sell them. That’s potentially a very different type of crime from arranging for a bunch of MSI GPUs to get loaded on the wrong truck without anyone noticing.
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The theft is another symptom of how bad the allocation of pretty much everything is right now, and what’s that doing to prices. There are RTX 3090 GPUs on eBay listing as having sold for $2,500 or more, which shows why someone would take the challenge on in the first place. Two hundred RTX 3090 GPUs at $2,500 each is a cool $500K.

Unfortunately, these prices are also why there’s no way to get your hands on much of the latest technology from Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Sony, or Microsoft. Low yields, high demand, and COVID-damaged supply lines have collectively made shipping products difficult. Hopefully, MSI is able to recover its property and find whichever individual at the company is responsible for the thefts.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-sh...15000-gpus

Demand for the latest consumer-grade graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia exceeds supply so badly that the scalping business now thrives more than ever. But gamers aren't the only customers who want to buy the latest GPUs. Apparently demand for Nvidia's A100 among data centers, scientists, and the HPC community is so high that it will take several months for the company to catch up, its VP recently admitted.

"It is going to take several months to catch up some of the demand," said Ian Buck, vice president of Accelerated Computing Business Unit at Nvidia, at Wells Fargo TMT Broker Conference Call. "What's exciting is the sort of the interest and growth in both training and inference. […] Every time we introduce a new architecture, it's a game changer, right? So A100 is 20x better performance than V100, and with that comes a new wave of demand and interest in our products." (based on SeekingAlpha's transcript.)

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/analys...ng-Q4-2020

Scalping has become one of the most irritating things afflicting the PC hardware and gaming console markets at the moment. With scalpers snatching up what little volume there is of the latest hardware, they make buying a new graphics card or CPU or game console nearly impossible -- at least at the MSRP. So Data Engineer Michael Driscoll from dev.to set out to see just how much money these scalpers have made off of the recent shiny new hardware, to hopefully get an idea as to how long this problem will last.

Driscoll created a program that can grab all of eBay's sold listings for the latest generation AMD and Nvidia silicon, as well as the two new consoles, and put them all together to get an idea of how prices were trending and how much money scalpers were making on these products. While eBay isn't the only place scalpers can sell products, it's where most scalpers go to sell the latest and greatest Nvidia and AMD hardware.

But first, a step back: If you don't know what scalping is, it's when a person (or company) buys a product for the sole purpose of making a profit off of it, specifically, selling it for much more money than the MSRP. This "hobby" works due to supply and demand; when supply is low and demand is high, scalpers can make huge profits. Because if demand is high enough, there will be a customer base that simply won't care how much that product will cost and buy it anyway. When supply starts meeting demand on a broad enough scale, scalpers lose almost all momentum because buyers can go to official retailers and buy the product at a fair price.

Michael's graphs aren't based on actual prices. Rather they are based on percentages, with each product's MSRP being the baseline. That makes reading these graphs a bit easier.
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All that said, we have good news, at least for PC enthusiasts and gamers: Besides consoles, most PC hardware components show an overall downtrend in prices. Hopefully, this trend will continue, and prices will get lower as we roll into 2021. The lower the prices go, the better for consumers because that means there's more volume going around and/or lessening demand.

Either way, assuming trends continue, if you're looking to buy a new GPU or AMD CPU and you don't need it by the end of the year, it may be a good idea to sit out the holiday season and check back in again sometime in January.