If you believed the rumors, AMD i Nvidia they were supposed to deliver a bunch of CES announcements stopping the show. Rumors that Nvidia would announce an RTX 3080 Ti or an RTX 3070 Super. Rumors that AMD would launch its RX 6700 later this month. Even Intel was calm about the state of its discreet Xe GPUs, even though it still had a lot of announcements about CPU for desktop computers i laptops. Laptop manufacturers seemed more confident of their ability to meet demand, at least in the coming months. availability. After that, it depends on how well each company planned its production schedule to keep stocks on the shelves, and well, I don’t feel totally sure about that with a imminent shortage of chips and everything.
During a normal CES year, we may have heard more about these MIA graphics cards, but provoking potential buyers if there are many chances that they will wait much later than the release date to get one? Not a great idea. Both AMD and Nvidia also announced all the bigger and better things before the new year, so there really wasn’t much left to announce that would cause excitement.
Most of the The 50-minute AMD conference was collected with testimonials from CEOs of other companies praising Ryzen CPUs and how they have benefited their businesses. It’s no mystery that AMD has some damn processors, also graphics cards. But it looked like AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series processors received more fanaticism last year. Maybe it was because of some unique laptops, like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, would be the first to have them. Or it was the first time AMD had a strong and viable alternative to Intel mobile processors, even though the company manufactured mobile processors for years before.
This time around, it felt like AMD glazed over the specifications of its new mobile processors, and even its performance compared to the previous generation and Intel equivalents. The only announcement AMD made about graphics cards was the mobile version of its new RDNA 2 cards, which will be released sometime in the first half of 2021.
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Nvidia’s formal CES announcement was shorter and more disappointing than AMD’s. The only desktop GPU he announced was the RTX 3060, which provoked a lot of people watching playback on YouTube to write EXHORIT in chat. The RTX 3080, 3070 and 3060 were also supposed to arrive on laptops, so that announcement was not so surprising when it arrived. It was more or less expected.
Nvidia announced that some games were getting DLSS and ray tracing and was talking about the resizable bar of its 30 Series cards: Nvidia and Intel’s response to AMD’s smart access memory to increase the speed of frames in some games, but nothing else appeared. (Of course, it would be nice if the option was enabled on Series 20 cards, as Series 30 is so hard to find for anyone other than scalpers.)
The most interesting news was presented in the form of a round table of questions and answers with the CEO of AMD, Lisa Su, to which only a select number of press was invited. But many of the questions revolved around supply and demand, according to Dr. Ian Cutress. Su told attendees that the shortage of chips is “the result of a demand-driven environment, rather than manufacturing problems.”
Su went on to say that he did not believe the shortage would limit AMD’s market share, but rising demand not only put pressure on foundries to make more chips, but also created a supply problem. raw materials, one of which Su said could continue until 2021. There is a lot of prioritization logistics between how many chips these companies have for end users and OEMs, but Su said it is a top priority for AMD to get more chips. in the hands of consumers.
Speaking of al 19th annual conference of the JP Morgan Tech Auto Forum on January 12, 2021, Nvidia also addressed the chip shortage, saying it expects inventory to “stay lean” until the end of March 2021 in both online and physical retail markets. “Our global capacity has not been able to keep up with the strong overall demand we have seen,” said Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer. Interestingly, Kress said cryptographic miners have not played a major role in the GPU demand that is happening right now.
In some of our own discussions with laptop suppliers over the past week, most said there would be enough new product to supply demand during the first wave of purchases. However, speaking with Acer, a spokesperson told us that supply could be reduced after this initial wave. So again, there is a similar problem going on with laptop vendors as with chip makers. (Laptop vendors need parts from chip makers.) Instead, an MSI spokesman told us that supply shouldn’t be a problem for their new laptops, as it has scheduled shipments that arrive weekly. MSI did not say how many weeks these shipments have been scheduled.
Logistically, once supply and demand begin to become uniform, it may be some time before consumers see that the products they want to buy begin to fill the shelves. Many companies prefer to ship their products by ocean freight because it is cheaper, but it usually takes a month or a little longer before everything arrives in U.S. ports. Shipping by plane is, of course, faster, but much more expensive, and depending on the country’s weather conditions as we move forward in the winter, some areas may experience longer delays than others. (It didn’t take me long to work in the semiconductor industry to find out which part of the shipping part is perhaps the most crucial.)
But while many of the hardware enthusiasts probably feel a little deflated after this week’s CES announcements, it’s probably best that AMD and Nvidia don’t raise our hopes too high, except for the big GPU and any other ad for when they do. I will land harder. I am expecting the supply of RTX 3060 GPUs to go as fast as all the others above. Heaters are likely to continue to worsen the supply and demand situation and annoy legitimate PC builders and parents who are still trying to get a new laptop for their children’s virtual school. Cryptographic miners will also fight hard to get all the cards they can. It is the circle of silicon life at this time. The only thing we can do, if we don’t need a new GPU, CPU, laptop or whatever it is right now is patient.