Three million add-in boards (AIBs) were sold to cryptocurrency miners in 2017
Click here to post a comment for Three million add-in boards (AIBs) were sold to cryptocurrency miners in 2017 on our message forum
Kaarme
The whole market is so weird because of miners. The miners would have actually bought much more units if they had been available, but the manufacturers weren't willing to sell because the miners are such thankless customers. Still, as a person who does not mine, that "Gaming has been and will continue to be the primary driver for GPU sales" feels like an insult with the current prices. Video cards are right now priced like expensive professional tools, so they obviously are meant for the professionals, whether it's the miners or companies and institutions using them for computing work. The current prices aren't aimed at gamers, not even as a joke.
fantaskarsef
Gaming is no longer driving GPU sales... that's all just PR talking, don't buy into it.
But I have to say, I'm not sure what makes a gamer a less "thankless" customer than a miner...
EJocys
nVidia took half of that sum which is $400 million or about 6% increase from their 6.91 billion revenue in 2016, but they decided to double prices and increased their revenue by 129% in 2018 by comparison with 2016, like China factories can't handle 6% increase in demand. Looks like shared monopoly market.
cryohellinc
There is some information floating that Next Nvidia's release will include 2 GPU series - Ampere for Consumer / Turing for Miners.
Personally, from my point of view, it will make the most sense. As I wrote earlier about it that will potentially stabilize the market and get it back on track.
However, it will Only work if Turing cards will have Significantly higher crypto performance, and vice-versa with Ampere. Hopefully, we will also see hardware level limitation for mining on Ampere.
Otherwise greedy cyber Dwarfs will continue buying out everything that moves.
fantaskarsef
Maybe I did misinterpret the stats above, but to me it looks like actually AMD is picking up big in market share. I don't really see any monopoly there...
Just be mindful, as Intel's iGPUs are integrated in this statistics, so are AMD's, so those shares given are not about dedicated GPUs.
Also, this is a little questionable:
So first they profit from higher demands than supplies, upping the revenue of the vendors and the margin of the sellers, then the demand drops and the costs increase because of utility costs driving up AIB prices? GTFO.
Also, many gamers don't use their cards for mining because they don't want to degrade them with 20h per day mining use and 4h of gaming...
cryohellinc
Kaarme
fantaskarsef
cryohellinc
There are always ex-miner cards on the market and when bubble pops we will have even more of them. Golden rule is to Never Ever Buy an Ex-Miner card.
Wear and tear on it is above anything remotely imaginable.
There was an article on one russian tech site, analyzing a batch of new gtx 1060's gpu's vs a batch of same models but ex-miner cards. Overall the result was that ex-miner cards had degradation from anything between 5% down to 30%.
Imglidinhere
fantaskarsef
Well, in your opinion, which I share, I'm not trying to defend mining here. It's just that if you take a step back, seeing it from a production company's point of view, the "better" customer is the one just paying more, and that's basically the miners.
Yes they do degrade, the question is, because a card has degraded 5% it doesn't make it useless. Do I understand correctly if I say those cards lifetime is shortened, or did they reach 5-30% lower clocks because of power delivery wear down or something like that?
aless83
Actually, if you look at it from a purely technical point of view, mining is better than gaming. Gaming is just wasting energy to amuse you. On the other hand, how many of us have actually used a GPU until it stopped working due to degradation? All my old GPU's still work and the most of us buy a new one even before it's necessary. And before somebody says something like "I NEED to play in 4k @60 fps": no you don't. That, imo, is a luxury. f you want it, you have to pay for it.
On the other side, Nvidia and AMD are public companies with their shareholders. All that matters is market share and profit. The mining craze is making them a lot of profit and they would be really dumb to not take advantage of it. "Gaming has been and will continue to be the primary driver for GPU sales" was probably said by their PR. Try saying that to the shareholders and convince them to make less money because "you care about the gamer". You'll have to clear your desk in a heartbeat.
cryohellinc
Dragam1337
fantaskarsef
Embra
Has revenue from miners over taken sales to gamers for some products? Be interesting to see the numbers.
fantaskarsef
Embra
cryohellinc
aless83