News GPU Shortages Hit Nvidia's Data Center Business: Not Enough $15,000+ GPUs

[Admin]

Nvidia's ultra-high-end compute GPU is in huge demand.

GPU Shortages Hit Nvidia's Data Center Business: Not Enough $15,000+ GPUs : Read more

 

[samopa]

Why would Nvidia want to pruduce $1,500 card or even $800 card if they still overwhelm in producing $15,000 card

 

[torbjorn.lindgren]

Why would Nvidia want to pruduce $1,500 card or even $800 card if they still overwhelm in producing $15,000 card

The A100 chip is produced in TSMC 7nm while the gaming cards are produced in Samsung 8nm and redesigning A100 for S-8nm would be massive and long undertaking (many months at best and result in reduced performance and/or higher power). So there's no competition between their gaming cards and the A100 on the chip side, and the same applies to other major components such as memory, basically there's little or no commonality outside commodity parts which can often be mixed and matched depending on what is available and is unlikely to be a bottleneck.

Note that this mean Nvidia A100 are in theory competing with TSMC's other 7nm customers for manufacturing space, IE with RX6800/6900, Zen3, XBox Series S/X, Playstation 5 and lots of different mobile SOCs (for phones). Given the price Nvidia get for the A100 they'd likely be willing to pay more for it but... all that capacity is bound up via iron-clad contracts, even if they offer TSMC more money they likely can't produce more for Nvidia right now!

If Nvidia produced gaming GPUs on TSMC 7nm they likely would have already redirected that production capacity to A100 but for RTX 30xx Nvidia uses the (new and slightly) inferior Samsung 8nm because they couldn't possibly get enough capacity for RTX 30xx from TSMC due to all their existing commitments TSMC had on it - to be fair RTX 30xx would have required a much larger capacity allocation than increasing A100 chip production but it shows that capacity there is tight, TSMC wouldn't leave money on the table if they had a choice.

The other obvious major component that could be their bottleneck for A100 is the HBM2 memory, there they're not competing with as many but supply is also much more limited and the other users also tend to use theirs in massively expensive hardware so they likely can't go the "we're paying more" route even if it's not bound up in contracts (and it may be).

 

[Gomez Addams]

I am not aware of any GPU sell for 15K and, as far as I know, they don't have one that sells for more than 10K.

Here's an example : https://www.thinkmate.com/system/gpx-qt8-12e2-8gpu. That is a page at Thinkmate's site who is an OEM that makes servers and workstations and also resells machines from SuperMicro, ASUS, Tyan, and others. They sell a machine with an EPYC CPU and the added cost to select an A100 GPU is $9799. That is considerably less than 15K. The Tesla GPUs are all in the 9K range also.