Tuesday, June 17th 2014
Graphics Card Shipments to Drop Drastically in Q2 2014
Graphics card vendors are bracing for a brutal spell for Q2, 2014, in which they expect sales to sequentially drop by 30 to 40 percent. They are attributing this to swelling inventories (unsold graphics cards) lower down the supply chain. The drop in graphics card sales, for the first time, is being attributed to a drop in the demand for GPUs by crypto-currency miners, who are either moving on to more energy-efficient mining technologies, such as ASICs, or quitting the business, following the drop in value of various major crypto-currencies, such as Bitcoin. These miners end up selling high-end graphics cards at attractive prices on marketspace websites such as Ebay, affecting brand-new high-end graphics card sales. Graphics card vendors (AIB and AIC partners), have asked GPU manufacturers AMD and NVIDIA, to help them cut prices to boost sales, however, both have cut down supplies, to deal with the situation, instead. Swelling inventories often translate into price-cuts for the end users, so be on the look out.
Source:
DigiTimes
51 Comments on Graphics Card Shipments to Drop Drastically in Q2 2014
There was indications that AMD did move wafer "starts" from Hawaii (originally AIB saw expectations low(er) and didn’t commit big to AMD, most not even ready for it). Given that I understand AMD might've flipped any excess Hawaii capacity "starts" to Tahiti; a) While that premium Hawaii chip was revered for mining, wouldn't AMD rather not water-down such premium offering in the used market when thing went bust?; b) AMD’s contract price to AIB’s for Tahiti was probably as lucrative or better, and yields spot-on; c) They get to move more units per wafer and volume is what was being clamored for; d) The increase in "Tahiti" gave rise to the “Pro” bins filling sooner, perhaps something AMD had yet to give the AIB’s in R9 280 spec's or pricing. That gave them a new Sku to price, which gave them something from mining boon in increase volumes at a good return. The problem it showed early March… within 90 days mining was already starting to go "bust".