The title says it all, really. We've only just been able to add AMD's latest RX 6800 and 6800 XT graphics cards to our shopping carts in multiple etailers, but the cat is already out of the bag and into scalpers' pockets. This has been a recurring event for all gaming-related tech, from DIY PC parts to the latest-gen games consoles from both Microsoft and Sony. At this point, it becomes moot to talk about availability issues, or demand issues, or reaching a conclusion between the two - the stock just isn't there for anything gaming-related, period.

Some etailers are only selling their graphics cards in-person, as a way to both control flow of stock and protect themselves from scalpers buying up the entire inventory with recourse to some digital sidekicks that automate the purchase process, and then allow them to resell anything from graphics cards from NVIDIA to AMD, passing through AMD's latest Ryzen 5000 series and the Xbox Series X and PS5 gaming consoles.

Intel has launched its Tiger Lake-U lineup of products back in September, with the availability of the first products in October. The launched lineup was part of the "U" variant of ultra-portable devices that stretched only to four core, eight threaded configurations. However, given that the new competitor in mobile space, AMD, has a wide portfolio of offerings that are coming with up to 8C/16T variants, Intel needs a proper response to that. Despite having a better single-threaded performance, the multi-threaded capability of the Ryzen 4000 series is delivering better performance. Thanks to the popular hardware leaker, TUM APISAK, we have the first appearance of Intel's 11th generation Tiger Lake-H processor.

Appearing in Userbenchmark, the processor was tested on a platform codenamed "Insyde TigerLake". The processor was spotted running 8 cores and 16 threads, at the average frequency of 2.75 GHz. This is only an engineering sample, meaning that these clocks do not represent the final frequencies of the processor. As a reminder, Intel's Tiger Lake CPU is a Willow Cove based design manufactured on Intel's 10 nm SuperFin silicon node. We are yet to see the capabilities of the new node and how the chip performs once the reviews arrive.

Shortages in supply of GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 graphics cards could persist until 2021, according to NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, responding to a question in a Q&A session of the GTC 2020 (Fall) conference. "The 3080 and 3090 have a demand issue, not a supply issue," said Huang. "The demand issue is that it is much much greater than we expected—and we expected really a lot," he added.

Jen-Hsun predicts that the Holiday 2020 shopping season will only compound availability woes. "I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply through the year. Remember, we're also going into the double-whammy. The double-whammy is the holiday season. Even before the holiday season, we were doing incredibly well, and then you add on top of it the "Ampere factor," and then you add on top of that the "Ampere holiday factor," and we're going to have a really really big Q4 season." He likened the demand of the RTX 3080 to that of the Intel Pentium in the mid-1990s. "Retailers will tell you they haven't seen a phenomenon like this in over a decade of computing. It hearkens back to the old days of Windows 95 and Pentium when people were just out of their minds to buy this stuff. So this is a phenomenon like we've not seen in a long time, and we just weren't prepared for it."

Scour the Internet's most likely tech-related places in forums such as TechPowerUp's own and Reddit, and a picture begins to form regarding NVIDIA's RTX 3080 launch. It's a bit like a Dali painting, with surrealist expectations, a whispered "NVIDIA's Ultimate Play" through virtual hallways, blink-and-you-missed-it details materialized in stock availability, and science-fiction-worthy bots scouring all available stores for their deployment overlords. Wherever you turn, there are would-be buyers complaining of furious F5 attempts (we heard F5 key replacements are also out of stock these days), with store availability going from "available soon" to "out of stock" faster than a single DOOM Eternal frame can be rendered. Most webstores crashed in one way or another, multiple buyers got attributed the same card from a webstore stock, and even NVIDIA's own store (you know, the one powered by the company who actually drives some of the world's fastest supercomputers) faltered under the pressure.

In other corners of the Internet, however, expectations were met and attempts flourished. These seem to have been mostly met by scalpers, though, so there is nothing idyllic in this particular painting - it's more akin to Edvard Munch's The Scream than it is Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night. On eBay, an RTX 3080 card was allegedly sold for 70,000$ - a particularly criminal act, if I've ever seen one. It's also common, right now, to see some of these going for prices ranging between $1,300 and $5,000 - and at this point, this writer feels he's almost out of metaphors for this particular situation. Apparently, a service named Bounce Alerts was used - it appears that most RTX 3080 orders were done through this service, which automatically bought as much RTX 3080 stock as it could from wherever they were sold. A user reported having acquired some 42 RTX 3080's from the NVIDIA store before stock ran out. There are even bots designed to bid on eBay sales so as to waste scalpers' time and make orders that will never be fulfilled - a sort of poetic justice, if you may, though I don't believe the kind Shakespeare himself would have conceived of.