Youtubers and some internet website have been blaming crypto-currency miners for the shortage of gaming GPUs.
This is a lie, because the real cause of GPU shortages is a decrease in GPU shipments from Nvidia, which has had (historically) 70% of market share for GPU shipments.
It is a well-known fact, Nvidia made significant inroads into AMDs market dominance for crypto-currency sales with the launch of the Pascal GPUs.
Before, the launch of Pascal GPUs – Nvidia’s gaming sales where around $800 million per quarter in 2016. But, from Q3 2016 Nvidia’s Pascal sales to crypto-currency miners increased by $300 million per quarter. Most people, on the Bitcointalk forums, will know the Pascal GPUs where a big hit with crypto-currency miners. And Nvidia’s gaming GPU sales rose from $800 million per quarter to over $1244 million per quarter after it mainstream launches.
In fact: I remember the retails prices of RX 480s and RX 470s slumping down in latter half of 2016 and early 2017: RX 480 8GB was selling for as little as $240 and the RX 480 4GB was around $210. Then, a memory strip mod was discovered for the RX 480s and RX 470s in 2017, which raised the mining productivity of GPUs by 13.2%. Also, a number of crypto-currency miners who had bought Pascal GPUs experienced unusually high failure rates on there Pascal GPUs. This led, people to switch back to AMD GPUs in Q1 and Q2 2017.
Finally, when AMD could not meet demand for GPUs by crypto-currency miners in Q3 and Q4, crypto-currency miners started buying Nvidia GPUs again. However this was offset by a huge sell-off defective GPUs cores by Nvidia to large crypto-currency miners. These defective GPU cores were sent over to AIB partners, who made them into mining cards (usually lacking display outputs) and gave them 3 month warranties. The proceeds for these defective GPU cores sales to crypto-currency miners was credited into Nvidia’s Q4 gaming GPU sales; it rose from $1251 million in Q3 to £1739 million for Q4. Yelp, large crypto-currency miners bought about $350 million worth of defective gaming GPUs cores from Nvidia in 2017, once minus the extra sales from the launch of GTX 1070 TI.
This is general background of crypto-currency miners purchasing history from Nvidia and AMD, which does not indicate causal effect for gaming GPU shortages, because crypto-currency miners buying habits were well-known for many years.
This brings us to the real reason for the GPU shortages in 2017 and this year. Nvidia has been reducing its GPU shipments for 2017, by over 9%.
Jon Peddie Research (
https://www.jonpeddie.com/).
Total GPU shipments down by -4.8% from year to year.
Desktop GPU shipments down by -2 from year to year.
Notebook GPU shipments down by -7 from year to year.
AMD GPU shipments rose by 8.1% year to year.
2016 GPU market share of GPU shipments. AMD 29.5%. Nvidia 70.5%
2017 GPU market share of GPU shipments. AMD 33.7%. Nvidia 66.3%
Nvidia has increased its datacentre sales from $250 million per quarter at the end of 2016 to $600 million per quarter by the end of 2017. Datacentres require bigger GPU cores, which comes at the cost of lower yields per silicon waffer as these GPUs core are very large. To meet the demand for this, Nvidia diverted more of its foundry production to make them. This meant less production at foundry for gaming GPUs and notebooks GPUs, which meant a reduction in amount of total GPU shipments made in 2017.
Next, shipping less gaming GPUs should reduce gaming GPUs turnover, but this did not happen for Nvidia because it launched very expensive GPUs like the GTX 1080 TI and GTX Titan Xp. This allowed Nvidia to maintain gaming sales turnover, more or less flat, whilst shipping less gaming GPUs. But, again the GTX 1080 TI and Titan Xp are bigger GPU cores, which means a reduction in net GPU shipments for the year because there is drop in yield per wafer as size of the GPU core increases.
And, datacentre demand for super-sized GPU cores has only increased in 2018 – so this will see a further reduction in GPU shipments for Q1 and Q2 of 2018.
As can be seen, the GPU shortages last year and this year are far more about Nvidia reducing its total GPU shipments for gaming GPUs and its move to making more big ticket gaming GPUs, than about the crypto-currency miners having periodic spikes in their demands for extra GPUs.
However, when you look at Youtubers and internet website coverage about shortages of gaming GPUs the fact Nvidia has been reducing its GPU shipments for 14 months has never been mentioned at all. Instead, crypto-currency miners have been blamed for it all.
