Friday, February 23rd 2024
NVIDIA Expects Upcoming Blackwell GPU Generation to be Capacity-Constrained
NVIDIA is anticipating supply issues for its upcoming Blackwell GPUs, which are expected to significantly improve artificial intelligence compute performance. "We expect our next-generation products to be supply constrained as demand far exceeds supply," said Colette Kress, NVIDIA's chief financial officer, during a recent earnings call. This prediction of scarcity comes just days after an analyst noted much shorter lead times for NVIDIA's current flagship Hopper-based H100 GPUs tailored to AI and high-performance computing. The eagerly anticipated Blackwell architecture and B100 GPUs built on it promise major leaps in capability—likely spurring NVIDIA's existing customers to place pre-orders already. With skyrocketing demand in the red-hot AI compute market, NVIDIA appears poised to capitalize on the insatiable appetite for ever-greater processing power.
However, the scarcity of NVIDIA's products may present an excellent opportunity for significant rivals like AMD and Intel. If both companies can offer a product that could beat NVIDIA's current H100 and provide a suitable software stack, customers would be willing to jump to their offerings and not wait many months for the anticipated high lead times. Intel is preparing the next-generation Gaudi 3 and working on the Falcon Shores accelerator for AI and HPC. AMD is shipping its Instinct MI300 accelerator, a highly competitive product, while already working on the MI400 generation. It remains to be seen if AI companies will begin the adoption of non-NVIDIA hardware or if they will remain a loyal customer and agree to the higher lead times of the new Blackwell generation. However, capacity constrain should only be a problem at launch, where the availability should improve from quarter to quarter. As TSMC improves CoWoS packaging capacity and 3 nm production, NVIDIA's allocation of the 3 nm wafers will likely improve over time as the company moves its priority from H100 to B100.
Sources:
Q4 Earning Call Transcript, via Tom's Hardware
However, the scarcity of NVIDIA's products may present an excellent opportunity for significant rivals like AMD and Intel. If both companies can offer a product that could beat NVIDIA's current H100 and provide a suitable software stack, customers would be willing to jump to their offerings and not wait many months for the anticipated high lead times. Intel is preparing the next-generation Gaudi 3 and working on the Falcon Shores accelerator for AI and HPC. AMD is shipping its Instinct MI300 accelerator, a highly competitive product, while already working on the MI400 generation. It remains to be seen if AI companies will begin the adoption of non-NVIDIA hardware or if they will remain a loyal customer and agree to the higher lead times of the new Blackwell generation. However, capacity constrain should only be a problem at launch, where the availability should improve from quarter to quarter. As TSMC improves CoWoS packaging capacity and 3 nm production, NVIDIA's allocation of the 3 nm wafers will likely improve over time as the company moves its priority from H100 to B100.
64 Comments on NVIDIA Expects Upcoming Blackwell GPU Generation to be Capacity-Constrained
allowing competition to chip away at their market dominance with other architectures is going to hurt more than less constrained markets and higher capex4070ti super for €400
Nvidia Sales goon - "Supply constraint?"
Jensen - "Perfect!"
The most stupid think is that the new games at low are still heavier than Watch Dogs 1 from 2014 at ultra and looks much worse. I am fine with Watch Dogs 1 ultra graphics but in 4-5 years I will need at least 4070 just to play with same level of graphics what I was used to play in 2014 with HD7870. Progress, just in back direction
Meanwhile, AMD's new RX 8700 XT (top RDNA 1.4 part) will stay on the older 4 nm process.
Prediction is double the raster performance, and triple the ray-tracing performance.
RTX 5090 will be 60% faster than RTX 4090, and launching between Q4 this year and Q2 next year depending on how fail AMD will be.
2022, RTX 4080 - $1200
2024, RTX 5080 - $2040 <- solution
2026, RTX 6080 - $3468
2028, RTX 7080 - $5896
2030, RTX 8080 - $10022
2032, RTX 9080 - $17038
2034, RTX 1080 - $28965
Jensen, we gamers are also suffering from supply constraint: supply of money in our pocket. So we will surely balance things out...
There is a whole bunch of smart people working on all that, regardless of how well the transistors shrink.
Gaming, as large as it is, can't do explosive growth. Or any quick growth. And they know it will be there, whether they market it or not - as long as they provide reasonable product. But when they have better things to sell, things with higher margins, they know they can put Gaming on sidetracks for years.