GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’

Re:GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’ by seiferteric on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @05:52PM (#16371637)

I bought a GTX1080 founders edition a few weeks after it came out over a year ago, after I was finally able to find one at best buy (of all places). I felt bad for spending all that money. I am seeing now they are selling used on ebay for more than I bought it for new. I can't remember a time in computer history where this has happened.

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Re:GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’ by alex_young on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @06:23PM (#16371875)

There's actually a well known phenomena known as a Chip Famine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_famine

Most of the time it's an earthquake in Asia that takes power plants offline and impacts supply.

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Re:GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’ by alasdair_ on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @06:06PM (#16371744)

It took me weeks of searching and refreshing newegg, amazon etc. just to buy a 16-port PoE unifi switch for a reasonable price recently. No idea why but apparently a lot of others had been having similar sourcing issues.

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Re:GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’ by paulmd on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @06:27PM (#16371914)

There is a shortage of silicon wafers right now as well, which is affecting all silicon production. I rather suspect this is another cartel that's dragging its feed expanding production - like DRAM.

(DRAM/flash prices have been on a continual incline because capacity growth has not been matching expected demand growth, and this was expected to continue through next year. China told the DRAM cartel to knock it off or they'd bring state-sponsored fabs online to fill the gap... and a few weeks later Samsung signed a memorandum of understanding and now prices are expected to decline throughout this year. Just a stunning coincidence /s)

http://www.china.org.cn/business/2017-12/23/content_50157479...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/21/china_memory_insour...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-samsung-elec-chips-outloo...

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3327772-samsung-headed-china-a...

And fab time on cutting-edge nodes is expensive as well. For example, BitMain is buying up more 16nm fab time than NVIDIA right now. So certain classes of high-performance silicon like 100 GbE switches may be in shortage as well.

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Re:GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’ by mapmap on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @08:25PM (#16372619)

There was a manufacturing defect with the PoE system on those switches. Ubiquity had to bring them all back and correct it. They are available again now.

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Re:GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’ by Declanomous on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @06:04PM (#16371724)

That definitely happened with GPUs back when bitcoin could be mined with GPUs. That also has happened with RAM recently as well.

Also, after a while certain enterprise hardware ends up being worth a fortune as desperate IT guys try to buy stuff as spares for a critical system that haven't been upgraded for whatever reason.

Then there's stuff like Raspberry Pi's, though they aren't really a computer part per se. That being said, computer parts occasionally do sell used for more than their list price.

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Re:GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’ by iMerNibor on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @06:32PM (#16371955)

> has happened with RAM recently as well.

Is happening sadly.. ram prices are still stupid

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Re:GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’ by paulmd on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @06:48PM (#16372045)

Oddly, used Jetson TK1s have always sold for higher prices on eBay than you could get them from Newegg or other suppliers, and I'm not clear on why.

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Re:GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’ by wyld_one on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @07:18PM (#16372242)

I would not buy one from eBAy used. You will never know just how much lifetime you have left after a 'miner' burned it 24/7/365.

And I thought the prices were a joke, but a AMD vega RX 64, was pricing between 1,100$ and 3,000$ 2/13/17

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Re:GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’ by outworlder on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @10:11PM (#16373117)

That depends on whether or not you can easily replace fans. Or if you are even going to use the fans (if watercooling GPUs, you don't care). Other than that, they were running 24/7, but usually focusing on efficiency (undervolted), many times without a case. This is usually better than "gaming" GPUs, which are overclocked and stuffed inside a case.

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Re:GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’ by mv4 on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @06:25PM (#16371895)

another "first" in computer history - it's now more expensive to build your own gaming or "machine learning" box from parts than to just buy a pre-made gaming computer.

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