The PC market, especially the GPU sector, has been one of those affected by the health crisis. Supply has been very low, and as you know, this translates to sky-high prices.
However, the storm might come to an end soon. NVIDIA’s Chief Financial Officer, Colette Kress, announced that they are working with its supply chain partners to increase their chip output.
Kress said that for 2022 they believe that they are in “great shape in terms of supply, being able to meet the demand that is out there.”
Both NVIDIA and AMD apparently have increased their manufacturing capacity to mend shortages of chips. In fact, NVIDIA is said to have made a long-term supply commitment of around USD6.9 billion to ensure a bigger chip supply this 2022.
One of those affected are gamers, who were beaten by cryptocurrency miners to the few available GPUs that are available in the market. Scalpers have been a big problem, too.
It’s not like NVIDIA didn’t do anything to mend the problem. For one, the company launched NVIDIA LHR GPUs, which is essentially a type of GPU that was created to have limited mining performance so gamers have a better chance of owning a new graphics card.
The lack of supply resulted in spikes in prices. In stores, GPUs are either out of stock or are being sold at two to three times their SRP.
It’s expected that the GPU supply and prices will start to normalize in the second half of the year. The wait is long, but it looks like a plausible forecast since PC makers like Alienware, ASUS, and others get first dibs on components.
The SRP is no longer real–those cards aren’t even being sold from the manufacturer at that cost. And, when all the GPU manufacturers are raking in massive profits, what motivation is there to push the price down? They’ve established new norms for the prices of GPUs and they will never return to previous levels. Miners have been tuning their software for LHR cards and have seen pretty decent gains with their optimisation. The good games want high end cards that are not cheap at all.