Just to pound the message home, the high-end miners switched to ASICS years ago.
That said, this is a nice overview of what's been going on with GPU's.
From PYMNTS.com, June 30:
Gamers can afford to buy the top-of-the line graphics cards needed to play the most demanding titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Far Cry 6 at their full potential.
And crypto miners and graphics cards makers are not happy.
Gamers and cryptocurrency miners were competing for a limited supply of graphics processing units (GPUs) made by Nvidia and AMD as far back as 2010, when early bitcoin miners discovered that GPUs were well-suited to the math puzzles they compete to solve first, in order to mint a new bitcoin block and receive a cache of bitcoin as a reward.
When the crypto bull market took off in mid-2020, the competition became a war, with Nvidia’s top-of-the-line GPUs so hard to find that speculators were selling $1,500 cards for two times the retail price or more on secondary markets like eBay. Miners bought more than $3 billion worth of GPUs since the beginning of 2021, Bloomberg reported on June 30.
Now, with crypto run down by bears and bitcoin back below its 2017 highs, Nvidia and other GPU makers are suffering a hangover as demand drops. Not only are the miners not buying, they’re dumping the cards they have on secondary markets and driving down prices. Crypto mining machines have a very brief lifespan before the giant mining farms that run thousands upon thousands of “miners” switch to the next generation. Those math puzzle are races, after all.
Worse — from Nvidia’s perspective — is that it is unlikely to ever again pick up with such fervor. That’s because with the exception of bitcoin, most of the new cryptocurrency blockchains don’t use GPUs anymore.
Not all crypto mining computers use GPUs, however. The best, and most expensive, are ASICS that use chips specifically designed for one blockchain and are not much good for anything else, while a miner running an Nvidia chip can use it to play Assassin’s Creed....
....MUCH MORE
Some previous posts in no particular order:- A Dip Into Chips: "AI Chip Architectures Race To The Edge"
- Hot Chips 2018 Symposium on High Performance Chips
- Chips: "A Rogues Gallery of Post-Moore’s Law Options"
- "Top-Rated Chipmaker Xilinx Gets Big Price-Target Hike On 5G Prospects" (XLNX; NVDA)
- "Why the Biggest Bitcoin Mines Are in China"
- Old School Analysis—Cryptocurrencies: Commodity Dynamics and Cartelization
- Chips: The Accelerator Wall—A New Problem for a Post-Moore’s Law World (GPU; ASIC; FPGA)
- Watch Out Nvidia, Xilinx Is Performing (reports, beats, pops) XLNX; NVDA
- Chips: NVIDIA Begins To Embrace the Move Toward More Specialized Chips (NVDA; INTC; AMD; GOOG; XLNX)
