Ampere Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tesla-...e-hardware

Tesla's CEO Elon Musk has been rather vocal about his enthusiasm for cryptocurrency lately, and now, the automaker Tesla has purchased $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin, according to a new SEC filing. The automaker also stated that it would start accepting Bitcoin payments in the near future, meaning you'll be able to buy a Tesla with just cryptocurrency exchanging hands. Unfortunately, that isn't good news for hardware enthusiasts as it means that demand for other coins, including those mined with GPUs, could intensify, exacerbating the ongoing shortages.
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But, curiously, Tesla's move came right before Elon Musk expressed enthusiasm about Bitcoin and Dogecoin on Twitter, which appears to have led both cryptocurrencies to higher prices. As such, Bitcoin is currently at a staggering price of over $44,000 USD, with Dogecoin moving from half a cent to well above 8 cents per coin, a new record high.

Considering the filing is from January, chances are that the $1.5 billion investment has already surpassed $2 billion in value.

That being said, this isn't great news for PC hardware. As Cryptocurrencies become more expensive, mining crypto becomes more profitable and therefore, miners will be willing to pay higher prices for graphics cards, which will only make the shortage worse than it already is. News just broke that Nvidia's RTX 3000 series GPUs are set for concerning shortages in Q1, and this is likely to only make matters worse.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/altern...ailability

When Nvidia launched its RTX 3000 GPUs, the availability of the cards was less than great, with demand far outstripping supply, leading to a shortage. Now a new report suggests the problem is about to get worse.

European hardware retailer Alternate, which operates in Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium, has spoken with Nvidia about availability and confirmed that, throughout the first quarter, the cards will be even more difficult to come by than before. There are multiple factors at play, including the surge in Ethereum mining, none of them good news.
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The retailer has a waiting list with a first in, first out criteria for placed orders. Your luck will apparently be better with RTX 3070 and RTX 3090 cards, as despite fewer incoming shipments, they aren't nearly as popular and thus have shorter waiting lists. The 3080 and 3060 Ti are in higher demand, still with very limited cards being delivered.
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Alternate goes on to explain that if you had already placed an order previously, your price will remain and you will keep your position in the waiting list. However, prices will be on the rise due to the reduced supply.

Dutch retailer Megekko is also filtering open orders and canceling and crediting those with multiple GPUs per order to try and weed out scalpers.

While this is all information stemming from European retailers, from what we're seeing, the situation is no different in the US. Both continents' products come from the same production lines, and the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3080 also appear to be most popular here. In other words, buckle up, because we're in for an extended bumpy ride.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/31...er-to-find

The once-solid guidance that this situation would resolve itself by the end of Q1 is looking increasingly shady, and we’re seeing multiple companies already warning that it might be the end of Q2 2021 before things are resolved. By the time the fifth anniversary of Pascal rolls around, we’ll be closing on the point where GPUs have spent more time above MSRP than at or below it over the past five years. Assuming this trend holds through May, we’ll have run higher-than-normal GPU prices for 28 out of the past 60 months.

This kind of sustained price inflation is destroying the idea that the PC market should treat GPU MSRPs as any kind of factual metric of cost. If you can’t buy a GPU at normal price literally half the time, GPUs effectively don’t have a “normal” price. They have an oscillating price that varies depending on other market conditions. Some companies, like Newegg, have set up lotteries to determine who gets to buy video cards in a bid to distribute them more fairly. And there’s no way to blame this on the pandemic — while COVID-19 has snarled factory production globally, GPU availability was tight in 2016, 2017, and early 2018 for reasons that had nothing to do with coronavirus.

Also, fun fact: While this report is specific to Nvidia cards, we can assume that shutdowns will hit availability for every scarce component, to one degree or another. AMD CPU and GPU availability, along with console availability, will get no favors from this.

Assuming AMD’s prediction holds true, we should see slowly improving availability after Q1.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/uk-par...g-ban-bill

Members of British Parliament led by Scottish politician Douglas Chapman are currently working to introduce a bill that would ban or limit gaming console and computer component scalping, according to new quotes from Wired and IGN.
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It’s possible, however, that the bill might face more opposition from logistics than from Parliament itself. Regulating scalping runs the risk of fostering government overreach into the acquisition and resale of private property, which limits what exactly Parliament can do to enforce a scalping ban. Even more limited intervention, like setting price maximums on sites like eBay, runs the risk of just forcing scalpers into less-regulated spaces like Craigslist or private forums.

Still, as we wrote about back in December, the scalping situation has gotten bad enough for cyber vigilantes to start popping up on resale sites, seeking to do what websites and governments won’tm by attempting to scam scalpers back. Whatever form it takes, it’s clear that some regulation would likely be welcomed by many consumers.

https://www.techpowerup.com/278248/indef...r6x-memory

A well-known leaker from NVIDIA cards past, Kopite7Kimi, has launched a rumor wherein the previously "indefinitely postponed" RTX 3080 Ti graphics card might see the light of day as early as April. Designed as an NVIDIA response to the price/performance offering from AMD's RX 6900 XT graphics card, the RTX 3080 Ti with an overkill 20 GB GDDR6X was rumored to have been in the works following the AMD launch. However, inventory difficulties related not only to wafer production from Samsung, but also GDDR6X supply from Micron and delays in the logistics channels meant that NVIDIA chose to shelve this graphics card release.

The new, reinterpreted RTX 3080 Ti graphics card is rumored to axe the 20 GB of GDDR6X memory in favor of a more tenable 12 GB - which some might argue is but a slight, but sufficient improvement from the RTX 3080's 10 GB. That memory amount, however, means that the card will have to carry a different, wider, 384-bit memory bus, which should mean improved memory performance, but also increased board costs. The RTX 3080 Ti is now rumored as carrying 80 enabled Streaming Multiprocessors (12 more than the RTX 3080's 68, and 2 less than the fully-enabled chip present in the RTX 3090.