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

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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