The fact that chips and hardware continues to rise in price was written on Habré more than once or twice . Indeed, memory chips, video chips and even hard drives with SSDs are becoming more expensive. At first, the reason was miners, now they continue to maintain a stable demand for everything that may be useful to them.
But according to experts, in recent years, they are not the only ones influencing the rise in prices. As far as you can understand, in the near foreseeable future, neither old nor new models of cards will become cheaper. On the contrary, prices only go up. Why?
Cheat intermediaries
A few days ago, experts of the igor'sLAB resource tried to find the reason for the active rise in prices for almost all card models. As it turned out, some additional players appeared in the supply chain, which led to a large gap between the recommended prices by manufacturers and the real cost of graphics adapters.
Not so long ago, NVIDIA tried to figure it out - its head, Jensen Huang, said that the shortage of video cards is associated with the increased demand (which, in fact, is understandable). But prices are not rising because of NVIDIA or its partners. The price of graphics cards increases towards the end of the supply chain.
This point of view was confirmed by the representative of igor'sLAB... He got hold of and published a price list of a wholesale supplier of PC components. The supplier is one of the links in the chain - the company buys cheaper, sells more expensive. And this is a somewhat strange practice, since the supplier is a kind of "shady" one. Previously, the company was engaged in the purchase of leftover components from the warehouses of large companies and sold them for a little more.
Now the company has somehow got the opportunity to purchase large quantities of video cards. She doesn't need them - it's just a product for resale. And graphics adapters are being sold at a very high price, and neither gamers nor miners have anything to do with it.
It is clear that one such company does not make much of the weather. But when there are several such links, the price increases significantly. Here is a screenshot of the price list that I managed to get .
If there is no desire to rummage through the price list, then below are the most interesting examples of prices. When evaluating them, it is worth remembering that this is the wholesale price of the product, not the retail one. There are a few more similar links to the end of the chain, so that in the end the price turns out to be very high.
- INNO3D GeForce RTX 3080 iChill X4 - $ 2659
- KFA2 GeForce RTX 3080 SG 1-click OC - $ 2379
- ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 Trinity OC - $ 2464
- ASUS GeForce RTX 3080 TUF Gaming - $ 2562
- ASUS GeForce RTX 3080 TUF Gaming OC - $ 2586
- Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 AORUS Master - $ 2623
- MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming Z Trio - $ 2684
- MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Suprim X - $ 2745
And four more reasons
As if artificial cheating is not enough, but experts point out four more factors in the growth of prices for video cards.
The first is the continued growth in demand for desktop PCs. The shortage of computers caused by the pandemic and the subsequent removal is still there, the shortage is quite serious. And many users want not just a PC, but a gaming computer so that they can work and have fun (well, or just have fun, let's not kid ourselves).
Second factor- companies do not have time to expand production capacity for the production of additional cards. This factor affects almost all components of the "iron" business, including RAM, processors, chips for SSD. But the most noticeable, of course, is the lack of video cards. Actually, manufacturers have no particular incentive to expand - prices rise, so that companies receive super-profits with the same level of production as before. There is no need to invest in new infrastructure; increasing the involvement of resources is also a beauty.
The third factor, not too well-known and obvious - the growth in demand for game consoles Microsoft and Sony. Yes, the architecture of the set-top boxes and components are different from purely computer ones. But we must not forget that components for consoles also need to be produced, and this is done by all the same manufacturers of computer hardware. Part of the capacities of these companies are used for the production of elements for consoles.
The fourth factor is the increasing needs of data center operators and large corporations. All of them need modern servers with modern components. Server memory is especially in demand. Under it, the production lines not used by the "console builders" are occupied, displacing video cards in some cases.
Each of the named reasons seems to be not too critical. But if you put everything together, given the problem with price hikes, then the situation begins to look not just bad, but very bad.
But that's not all
We talked about the lack of video chips earlier. But now the cost of GDDR6 video memory has started to rise rapidly. This is the 6th generation of DDR SDRAM for graphics processing and high performance applications. They also do not have time to produce memory in the required volumes.
In the next quarter, the price of chips will increase by about 13% from the figures for the second quarter of 2021. And this despite the fact that in the first quarter prices have already increased by 10%, in the second - by another 20-25%. There are no forecasts for the fourth quarter yet - apparently, analysts are simply afraid to make them. If we take into account only what is still there now, by the beginning of autumn 2021 the cost of GDDR6 memory alone will increase by 50%.
According to experts, this is nothing - at the peak, GDDR6 spot prices increased by 200% in relation to contract prices. Perhaps, by the end of the year, the ratio will even out slightly, but there is not very much hope for this.
Is there a light ray in the dark realm of scarcity?
But fans of cryptocurrencies, if the volatility of the latter is the same as it is now or even stronger, can slightly reduce the intensity of passions. Already, the demand for cards with GDDR5 has slightly weakened, so there is hope for a drop in the cost of at least old video adapters.
As for the new ones, the excitement is likely to be the same as it is now, at least in the near future. And if you need a gaming computer, then it will cost the price of a cast-iron bridge, or even two. Experts, as before, predict the end of the crisis with video chips, DRAM and video memory no earlier than 2022.
