I am one of the unfortunate ones with 2 PCS at home and neither having a decent card at the moment.
All I see is 2300 Euro worth of cards over at eBay. Don't know what to do and how to get one without getting robbed.
I'm reading online all sorts of stuff and it seems to me (albeit I ain't no expert), that it must be due to a combination of things really.
1) Miners indeed.
2) Scalpers also.
3) Unexpected demand much higher than usual.
4) Lack of foundry diversity.
Just talking out of my ass here, but it seems to me that only having tsmc producing stuff, is a pretty frightening thought. I mean, even Intel considers outsourcing to tsmc? Are we for real?
Someone outside of the business, would assume that it's an ideal opportunity to jump in the wagon and make some money. Lots of money, in fact. However and now things get really interesting and pretty strange for an outsider, that seems to be out of the question? I mean, is it so inherently complex to start designing a new graphics card architecture as well as a fab to manufacture it? It must be cause nobody seems to be able to do it. Even the lads with the deep pockets are not interested, it seems.
Also, I've been reading some stuff about the start ups designing AI chips for NN training etc. They are quite a few around and again, all they can afford is the DESIGN? I mean, as far as construction, they send orders to tsmc also? What the hell is going on in here?
Anyway, I'm really really disappointed I cannot get a couple of 3080s for the 2 PCs we have at home, let alone just 1. Sorry about the rant, lads.
Pretty much everything you're saying here is accurate, but to answer your main question:
Designing chips is overall relatively cheap - they're all built from the base silicon components (the specifics of which are provided by the fab you're working with for your chip), so you "just" need appropriate design software and a team with the skillset necessary to understand how to make transistors do whatever magic it is you want them to do. That's a millions-of-dollars type of cost scale, unless you're designing mature, highly optimized products in a very competitive market, in which tuning and tweaking massively increases costs. Manufacturing chips is
incredibly expensive and complex. Developing cutting-edge fabrication nodes is something very, very few companies are capable of. Intel's persistent failure to deliver new nodes on time for the past 7 years and GloFo dropping out entirely of the cutting-edge node game are both clear signs of this. We're talking development costs in the billions of dollars, as well as similar costs for every single fab built.
Another crucial issue that causes some of this that you didn't mention is that there's just one company producing lithography machines for these nodes: ASML.
Everyone buys the machines they use to make chips from them - TSMC, Samsung, Intel, everyone. And they have relatively limited production capacities - on the order of ~100 machines a year, which when considering that each fab needs more than one of these for any kind of volume production, is not a lot. There are other companies making lithography machines for legacy nodes (IIRC both Zeiss and Nikon have been in this market, though I don't know if they still are), but given that the manufacturing and development of this equipment is in and of itself incredibly expensive and complex, things tend to consolidate in unregulated capitalist systems. What we're seeing in this regard is just an expression of a decades-long process.
I don't see this improving without public/government intervention, as the pressures on companies to deliver profits to investors in most parts of the world are far too harsh for such a venture to be feasible. The world needs to start recognizing that silicon fabrication is a crucial aspect of global infrastructure, and that it needs to be broadly supported if we are to avoid potentially very dangerous shortages. And happily a lot of governments (at least the US and EU) are recognizing this, but these things are slooooooow to get off the ground. I mean, first you need billions in funding, then you need land (with highly specific requirements) and 100% stable power infrastructure and a qualified (and extremely specialized) workforce, then you need to build a fab, which takes a long time, then you need to get your lithography machines, which takes several years .... yeah, this is going to take some time to fix. But for any fix to be sustainable, it needs to be kept at least partially out of the control of kleptocrat investors and financiers - unless the knowledge requires to build, maintain and develop this is at least partly publicly owned and available, we'll just keep falling into this situation.
Wrong.
I'm telling you, that to stop "out of stock" situation supply needs to beat demand.
If you are able to satisfy only 40% of orders, even DOUBLING number of units available, i.e getting to 80% of demand, won't get you out of "out of stock" situation.
Again: please stop pretending that demand and supply aren't affected by time. Speaking of these things as if they are static or in "snapshots" like that is meaningless. Demand is dynamic and finite, just as supply is. As more is produced, you get closer to meeting demand.
There are easily 50 million people worldwide interested in a new console. That obviously doesn't mean even remotely close to all of them have the money to buy one now - that number (which is a random example, obviously) is total possible demand for the product. We know console sales are highly cyclical, with massive sales spikes around new releases and smaller spikes around refreshes, with everything else following a pretty typical decelerating decline until some semblance of a steady-state level of demand is hit. So there might be 15 million willing and able to buy a console in the first 6 months, but another 10 million over the next year, and another 5 the year after that, and so on. To meet demand, you need to chip away at that initial mass, as that's where the bulk of sales are found and where issues arise. And the longer you take to meet that initial demand, the longer you'll have shortages, angry customers, etc., as the volumes are that much higher. In this example scenario, if you're only able to meet 50% of demand for the first 6 months, that pushes another 7.5 million buyers into the next year, nearly doubling demand for that period. So the longer you're unable to meet demand, the more harmful it is, as you just keep pushing customers away, and keep piling up unmet demand. That's why you do everything in your power - hire more temporary staff, order more parts, rent more facilities, even build new factories! - to meet demand as early as possible, as those are a) sales just waiting to happen, meaning revenue, and b) potential angry customers that will hurt your reputation long-term if you fail to meet demand. Compared to that, whatever initial costs are needed are typically quite small, and can be made up for in various ways (if you've built a factory, you can always sell it or use it for something else, after all).
And again, I've never argued that this would magically fix things, I said it would
improve things. If you meet
a higher proportion of demand at any given time, that means you've eliminated more of the total pool of demand. That means there's less future demand to deal with in order to catch up. Thus, any increase in production volumes
helps. Is that really so hard to grasp?
