News Worldwide Graphics Card Supply Improves, But High Prices Linger

[alceryes]

The only way gamers can buy "cheap-ish" GPUs going forward is to get them at launch at MSRP in the first few minutes 26 seconds.

I corrected the above for you. 😆

 

[alceryes]

Not all of the time. Before semiconductor shortages went out of control, the target was to keep production lines busy 80-90% of the time, the other 10-20% of the time used for preventive maintenance, tooling changes, spare capacity for rush and surge orders, etc. To run at close to 100%, they have to extend maintenance intervals, minimize tooling changes, give up on the ability to fulfill surge/rush orders and all other sources of down-time, which can have costly consequences further down the line.

They are still performing the necessary maintenance - they have to.
But with more ASAP orders than they could possibly fill it's become a 'who wants it more' scenario. Sometimes these production contracts have delivery 'wiggle room' for the foundries and even if they didn't the foundries will always calculate the potential gain in flat out failing to meet a previous contract agreement to, let's say, fulfill an ASAP 2 mil order from NVIDIA for double the usual price.

Money talks, as the saying goes.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Step off a high cliff, and you'll get raped by the law of gravity. Slam your Prius into a tractor-trailer and you'll get raped by Newton's laws of motion. Touch a hot stove, and you'll get raped by the laws of heat transfer. Ah, those pesky laws of nature.

Those are laws of nature. They are not laws of retail.

 

[InvalidError]

They are still performing the necessary maintenance - they have to.

I didn't say necessary maintenance, I said PREVENTIVE maintenance.

Necessary maintenance is maintenance that cannot be delayed, often because telemetry or QA is starting to flag issues such as parts rejection rates going up or tolerances getting sloppy. Preventive maintenance is done ahead of any apparent problems to prevent them from appearing in the first place.

In cars for example, the oil changes every 8 000km are preventive: manufacturers make you toss the oil long before it goes out of specs since it is simpler and cheaper to do that than lab tests to find out when it is actually necessary for your driving style in the type of traffic you typically drive in, environmental conditions, etc.

Likewise, fabs have a bunch of maintenance that they would normally do during downtime because it is cheaper to do it on an opportunistic basis than wait for it to show up in production. Under zero-downtime conditions though, you may want to skip non-critical maintenance when it is more likely something else will require a maintenance break first and give you an opportunity to catch up on preventive maintenance.

 

[Endymio]

Those are laws of nature. They are not laws of retail.

The law of supply and demand is a law of nature as well. You can repeal it about as easily as you can pass a law against gravity.

 

[Darkbreeze]

No, supply and demand are FULLY man made concepts. Nature, does not much care to barter or trade, and certainly has no concern with retail. Nature simply takes what it wants and the strongest survive. But none of that really has anything to do with this article anyhow.

 

[USAFRet]

The only way gamers can buy "cheap-ish" GPUs going forward is to ....

...build and fund a largish botnet to capture a bunch of them in the initial few seconds.
Then, sell them at MSRP to fellow gamers.

Of course, they'd need to raise the price a bit to recoup the costs of the botnet, first purchase, and shipping.
Thereby becoming the thing they are trying to combat.


Then, the current scalpers would just buy them anyway.

 

[Endymio]

No, supply and demand are FULLY man made concepts. Nature, does not much care to barter or trade, and certainly has no concern with retail.

I'm sorry, but this isn't correct at all. I'm not sure you understand exactly what this law entails, but it applies to far more than man-made retail markets, and is a tool used in analysis of situations ranging from macroeconomic public policy to molecular biology.

 

[Darkbreeze]

We are only concerned with retail, here.