I think you are mixing up a few cycles into one. There hasn't been a GPU "shortage" for multiple years. But there are certainly shortages at different times in the past few years.
Nvidia had to manipulate their Financial Numbers to cover up for excessive stock sitting in Channel due to Bitcoin crash. It took them 3 quarters ( and more ) to clear those inventory out. AMD had similar situation but their impact were much smaller due to less percentage using it for mining.
This teach GPU vendor an important lesson. ( Edit: Imagine the worst case scenerio AMD has a new product launch and has ample of stocks while you have three quarter worth of old products not moving. )
Since then they are much more conservative with respect to forecast and planning. It is FAR better to have enough demand waiting for GPU than it is for GPU sitting in channel quite literally begging for their Distributors to sell them.
This conservativeness has a knock-on effect on TSMC planning. At the start of pandemic everyone thought the economy could take a tank, which means forecast and estimation were even lower. But reality is all of a sudden PC sales and GPU sales are hitting new height due to more Stay at home and Gaming. Bitcoin is pushing into new height so casual miners are back.
You are taking two conservative supply decision ( Previous over Supply and Pandemic ) and two Demand reality ( PC / Gaming and Bitcoin ). That is Four level of differences. Catching up takes time, and it doesn't help when the whole industry, not just GPU, but everything from WiFi, 5G Modem, SoC, CPU, Amazon Server GPU, NPU are all in demand. Both Intel and AMD grew 10% despite Intel having lower ASP ( i.e Higher Unit Sales ) and were selling as many as they could. The Silicon demand are far greater than even the most optimistic analysis has predicted.
If you want evidence check out this link. It shows the the lifetime prices of a GTX 1060 card since its release in 2016. It had an MSRP of $250, yet for most of it's life since sometime in 2017 it's been around $320 or higher, more than 125% of the MSRP, and, when this particular model was last available, over $400. Even used its almost always been above $250, with an average used price over $350:
Why multiple years? It's unlikely the current shortage will take that long, and it only started at the end of last year. In Summer 2020 buying a gpu was not a problem. Then the RTX 3000 series launched with basically no cards actually being available, and all following releases were like that from both vendors.
But both the RTX 2000 series and the Radeon RX 5000 cards have been easily available back then (okay, iirc the USA had some supply issues, but that was domestic Covid and not production related), so there was no reason for them to ramp up production for now during the last 3 or 4 years.
> Even used its almost always been above $250, with an average used price over $350.
It's a high end 1060. Which in practice means almost nothing but that people will overpay for it, expecting better performance and quality than they'd get.
The $400 price when last available is a pricing artifact of the end of cards lifetime. When they stop being available, some vendors will ask ridiculous prices to basically scam those that do not know they could get a newer better model instead, or are enterprise customers that have to buy the exact same model as the one to be replaced because of bureaucratic stupidity.
Also, camelcamelcamel tracks Amazon prices. US Amazon is the most ridiculously overpriced hardware shop I've ever seen, with only occasional good offers in between. You can't take those prices of specific models serious.
So yes, this 1060 might have had a "shortage" after it stopped being produced and even 1060s in general did have one at one point in time, but at the same time GTX 1650 Super, the GTX 1660, the GTX 1660 Super or especially a RX 480/580 had been readily available (after the crypto bubble of course).
I do hope that this is a revival of the desktop PC!
It was my impression before BTC that ASICs weren't particularly frequent, since FPGAs existed for a lot of applications, but mining has the pressing need for absolute performance and tuning and iteration that it would accelerate that space.
In the last year bitcoin is over 200%. Litecoin is almost over 100% (in fact, since April it is over 200%). I have no horse in this race, but I am not sure I would call it "not a bubble".
I was under the impression that no one bought GPUs for mining anymore in general, as it's a waste of money compared to specialized hardware. During the last crypto bubble I noticed a lot of regular people building mining PCs, this time I noticed nothing of that sort. However, https://www.notebookcheck.net/New-financial-analysis-suggest... suggests I might have been wrong about that.
Only real reason to mention bitcoin is that basically all cryptocurrencies go up and down in price with bitcoin, so when bitcoin goes up in price, other cryptocurrencies tend to do so as well, incentivising mining all of them.
I read breathless reviews of how the latest card performs so well even though it's just $x MSRP and the reality makes that seem ridiculous. It shouldn't take 3 or 4 years to ramp up production that much. Yes, demand has increased, but again they've had years to react to that trend. I'd like to be able to buy a mediocre card for less than $500.