• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

GPU prices — is the worst behind us ?

HockeyJon said:
The demand for compute is real. The customers have said so. Companies like Microsoft have stated that power remains a constraint on how much compute they can currently deploy, but I reject the notion that the demand isn't real.

The author of this article is a noted critic of big tech and AI in general. That doesn't immediately discount anything and everything he says, however, if there's one thing I've learned in all of my years learning about business and financial markets, don't listen to what the talking heads and analysts say; LISTEN TO WHAT THE CUSTOMERS SAY. That's the key. The customers are telling you the demand is real. The customers are telling you AI is making a difference for them. The customers are telling you they need more compute, not less.

Are some overbuying? Possibly. I think once Sam Altman announced he was buying 40% of the annual productive capacity of RAM, a lot of companies reacted with big orders knowing they're also going to be in need of memory, but those companies have also said the constraint remains two things: power and compute capacity. They have not been reporting they have a surplus of either of those two things.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I agree, a lot of these guys don’t recognize how powerful and useful ai is. I see the demand in business and personal use.
It’s implied, and I think it’s possible, given how unethical nvidia is, that the reason the hyperscalers bought so much more Blackwell than they could deploy for years was pressure by nvidia around future supply.
 
HockeyJon said:
I think once Sam Altman announced he was buying 40% of the annual productive capacity of RAM,
Click to expand...
That a bit how it was reported but it was not that.

It was not just Altman, but an group entity, stargates LLC. (40% softbank, Oracle/MGX, 40% openAI backed by Microsoft promise to use all the extra up to 100% of what OpenAI will not)

It was a large portion of future yet to be built high end ram wafer capacity, not of today ram and by the time it scale at the peak 900,000 wafer per months if it ever do, that will not be 40% of the dram by then. at the time of that deal, not even 10% of the world dram wafer production were good enough for OpenAI projected use to start with (i.e. there was not that amount to be bought)...

OpenAI has yet to start making their own chips at volume at to use it, about none of the current situation has a link with that deal, maybe it accelerated some wafer line upgrades (but also fresh new project has well), but the actual use of dram wafer by them is more a ramping up in 2028 to reach the big numbers in 2029 or something like that.
 
Ugh, I bought two RTX 5080's and I am glad I did. One I got for under $1000 and the second was $1200. Looking at $1700 these days. Used to build a complete system for that price eon's ago.
Probably will hold on to those for a few years. Nvidia better keep with the fine wine drivers.....
I still kick myself for not grabbing a 5090 when I could.

Cut a deal with a member here yesterday to let a RTX 4070 go for $300 shipped.
 
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
zerogg said:
Yeah, I agree, a lot of these guys don’t recognize how powerful and useful ai is. I see the demand in business and personal use.
It’s implied, and I think it’s possible, given how unethical nvidia is, that the reason the hyperscalers bought so much more Blackwell than they could deploy for years was pressure by nvidia around future supply.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't necessarily call pushing your customers to buy more product "unethical". A customer is free to say no if they decide they're not going to need it. Your job as a salesman is two fold. One is to maximize sales, and the other is to help your customer determine the best solution for them, naturally around your product. Based on the current landscape, again, listening to what the customers are saying, they want more compute and not less, so I don't think Nvidia's sales team had to apply a lot of pressure to convince their customers that they should lock up more supply rather than less.

That all said, there is a lot of BS and FUD I'm seeing on the bearish side, even from otherwise smart individuals. A lot of these guys stand to profit if things go south, no doubt. In the meantime, you can choose to be on either side of this. Investors who have bet on AI over the past four years have done remarkably well. Certainly enough to purchase a couple of GPUs at these elevated prices with money left over. The bears have either made zero or lost.

At the end of the day, the customers are saying they're running these GPUs into the ground, so if there are any stashed away in a warehouse somewhere, it doesn't seem like this is due to some weird hoarding strategy to mask an otherwise failing industry. We saw reports this week with photos of literal skid loads of 5090s being delivered to server farms for installation. There's a reason you're paying $7000 now for a $2000 card.
 
HockeyJon said:
I wouldn't necessarily call pushing your customers to buy more product "unethical". A customer is free to say no if they decide they're not going to need it. Your job as a salesman is two fold. One is to maximize sales, and the other is to help your customer determine the best solution for them, naturally around your product. Based on the current landscape, again, listening to what the customers are saying, they want more compute and not less, so I don't think Nvidia's sales team had to apply a lot of pressure to convince their customers that they should lock up more supply rather than less.

That all said, there is a lot of BS and FUD I'm seeing on the bearish side, even from otherwise smart individuals. A lot of these guys stand to profit if things go south, no doubt. In the meantime, you can choose to be on either side of this. Investors who have bet on AI over the past four years have done remarkably well. Certainly enough to purchase a couple of GPUs at these elevated prices with money left over. The bears have either made zero or lost.

At the end of the day, the customers are saying they're running these GPUs into the ground, so if there are any stashed away in a warehouse somewhere, it doesn't seem like this is due to some weird hoarding strategy to mask an otherwise failing industry. We saw reports this week with photos of literal skid loads of 5090s being delivered to server farms for installation. There's a reason you're paying $7000 now for a $2000 card.
Click to expand...
LOL. Nvidia is raking in the bucks and as an investor, I'm happy. I have no problems with them going for max profit. Gamers are whiners and insignificant to be honest. I can afford to buy the high end and have no problem looking down on insignificant poors.
 
DooKey said:
LOL. Nvidia is raking in the bucks and as an investor, I'm happy. I have no problems with them going for max profit. Gamers are whiners and insignificant to be honest. I can afford to buy the high end and have no problem looking down on insignificant poors.
Click to expand...
giphy.gif
 
Shoganai said:
Bro stfu or get out of the thread. This thread isn't about you and your tiny peen. The thread topic is the current state of hardware prices, which is being directly affected by this AI garbage. GPUs especially. AMD is being affected as well. Just because I can afford overly priced things doesn't mean I don't find it deeply concerning. A pack of USB 3.2 drives I bought last year for 40 bucks now costs 350. I do wedding and event photography and it costs me 6 times as much when I need to buy new internal storage for my cameras. Can I afford it? Yes. Do I want to pay those prices? No. Honestly how old are you ... 12? Grow up.
Click to expand...
I am old and have money. I'll spend it how I want. I just don't care anymore. I am retired and have FU money for GPUs and PC stuff. Suck it up. I'm just as entitled to my spending and opinions as you are.
 
Last edited:
Shoganai said:
No, you're being a douche bag. You can do whatever you want with your money without shitting on others. Also, being okay with skyrocketing prices means the majority of gamers won't be able to afford GPUs anymore if this keeps going in this direction ... and NVIDIA is already focusing less on gaming GPUs to focus on AI ... which means it's a possibility that you may not even be able to buy gaming GPUs in a few years. Then no amount of money will matter.
Click to expand...
AMD will save you.....

I'm old like I said. I have money and spend it on high-quality stuff. I will never apologize for that. If industry says no more gaming GPUs it's obvious the business has changed. You and I can't change that. Let's talk about AMD and their support of gaming.
 
Shoganai said:
I'm talking about you being a douche bag, not telling you how to spend your money. You can spend all your retirement money on cocaine. I don't care. That isn't the issue. Just stop treating others like shit for absolutely no reason. Nobody cares that you're old and have money. Good for you. That's the dream. I'm still relatively young and have money, but I'm not going to flaunt my money and treat others like shit because I'm in a better station in life than some people. Children treat others this way. Not retired old people.
Click to expand...
All good. Feel like you want to feel.
 
DooKey said:
LOL. Nvidia is raking in the bucks and as an investor, I'm happy. I have no problems with them going for max profit. Gamers are whiners and insignificant to be honest. I can afford to buy the high end and have no problem looking down on insignificant poors.
Click to expand...

BFD, I can afford to buy a 5090 daily but have no reason to act like an ahole on this forum like you are right now. As you stated, you're old af so take a rest grandpa.
 
DooKey said:
LOL. Nvidia is raking in the bucks and as an investor, I'm happy. I have no problems with them going for max profit. Gamers are whiners and insignificant to be honest. I can afford to buy the high end and have no problem looking down on insignificant poors.
Click to expand...

They don't need you at all. They don't have to release anything for gamers, as you put it, you don't matter at all.
 
Imagine someone telling you back in like 2016 that flagship gamer cards would retail for 10k.. I actually feel really bad for the young dudes. Like the ones looking to build their first or second gaming pc. I don't really see it getting better either.
 
TheToE! said:
Imagine someone telling you back in like 2016 that flagship gamer cards would retail for 10k.. I actually feel really bad for the young dudes. Like the ones looking to build their first or second gaming pc. I don't really see it getting better either.
Click to expand...
I think there will eventually be a 3rd consumer graphics card manufacturer (I'm not including Intel, since they decided to stop their efforts), that will eventually take the marketshare of both NVIDIA and AMD. I don't see NVIDIA and AMD focusing on consumer graphics cards if AI gets fully integrated into society at large. If it's a Chinese company, too bad for the U.S., as U.S. will likely have a full embargo on China's tech products soon (part of it's already been in effect). There's no pushback against it except for a few of us poor peons, but all the politicians are banking off the tech broligarchy.
 
El_Capitan said:
I think there will eventually be a 3rd consumer graphics card manufacturer (I'm not including Intel, since they decided to stop their efforts), that will eventually take the marketshare of both NVIDIA and AMD. I don't see NVIDIA and AMD focusing on consumer graphics cards if AI gets fully integrated into society at large. If it's a Chinese company, too bad for the U.S., as U.S. will likely have a full embargo on China's tech products soon (part of it's already been in effect). There's no pushback against it except for a few of us poor peons, but all the politicians are banking off the tech broligarchy.
Click to expand...

That company would just then go after AI too
 
kram182 said:
That company would just then go after AI too
Click to expand...
Not necessarily. It's a flooded market. Why be in 5th place, when you could be in 1st? They'd be an afterthought in the AI market, and at least 2-3 years behind. Meanwhile, the consumer market is also 2-3 years behind, with higher demand.
 
El_Capitan said:
Not necessarily. It's a flooded market. Why be in 5th place, when you could be in 1st? They'd be an afterthought in the AI market, and at least 2-3 years behind. Meanwhile, the consumer market is also 2-3 years behind, with higher demand.
Click to expand...
When 5th place in that market makes you even as little as 2x the profit compared to being 1st in the consumer gpu market, there's still no benefit. At this point it's more likely there will be 0 players, everyone will only have integrated graphics in the future.
 
El_Capitan said:
Not necessarily. It's a flooded market. Why be in 5th place, when you could be in 1st? They'd be an afterthought in the AI market, and at least 2-3 years behind. Meanwhile, the consumer market is also 2-3 years behind, with higher demand.
Click to expand...

Why only make $1 when you can make $10?

Don't you remember how people said the same thing about CXMT RAM you were, and then they decided to just chase the big money instead?
 
arnemetis said:
When 5th place in that market makes you even as little as 2x the profit compared to being 1st in the consumer gpu market, there's still no benefit. At this point it's more likely there will be 0 players, everyone will only have integrated graphics in the future.
Click to expand...
Maybe if said company was involved in AI 2-3 years ago. The AI bubble will one day burst, but consumers will still be screwed over unless some revolution actually happens. Not likely. There's too many consumer products dependent on the graphics card industry. iGPU's will never be as cost effective as discrete GPU's, and those iGPU's are highly expensive. The fastest currently is what, the 358H? It's still about 25% slower than an RTX 3050, while costing at least 4x as much.
 
TheToE! said:
Imagine someone telling you back in like 2016 that flagship gamer cards would retail for 10k.. I actually feel really bad for the young dudes. Like the ones looking to build their first or second gaming pc. I don't really see it getting better either.
Click to expand...
I would have never believed it.
 
kram182 said:
That company would just then go after AI too
Click to expand...
Getting into training would be really hard, going into inference that could have diverged a lot from gaming GPU (memory-cache need tend to be different, bit precision is now different also)

Specially if the company first client was say, Nintendo that still need to make GPUs for its console and need that relationship to be safe.

El_Capitan said:
iGPU's will never be as cost effective as discrete GPU's,
Click to expand...
I am not sure how big the distinction is between an iGPU and the GPU in a PS5 SOC, but I would assume the PS5 way of doing things is the most cost effective.

One possible nearissh futur, is that very little raster is needed to feed the inference based renderer.... i.e. that strong AI hardware will be excellent to game, you will have a little bit of exact baseline running that does not require more than modest today hardware capacity and cerebras speed inference doing the final result, game engine (from physic, to decision making) having been train on supercomputer
 
LukeTbk said:
Getting into training would be really hard, going into inference that could have diverged a lot from gaming GPU (memory-cache need tend to be different, bit precision is now different also)

Specially if the company first client was say, Nintendo that still need to make GPUs for its console and need that relationship to be safe.
Click to expand...

It would be hard for a newcomer to make a sufficiently performant, small, power efficient GPU for something like a Switch, for a company like Nintendo, as well
 
kram182 said:
It would be hard for a newcomer to make a sufficiently performant, small, power efficient GPU for something like a Switch, for a company like Nintendo, as well
Click to expand...
Yes extremelly but how hard it is, is also how good the competition, in inference you have Grog/Cerebras that started a decade ago, Google/Nvidia has well and the giant Amazon/openAI/meta/SpaceX and so on.

Right now it is hard because you compete with ATI/AMD-Nvidia that have been doing it for 30 years+, if we become a world were everyone that was making gaming GPU leave for doing AI inference with their time and access to silicon, being the best option for a switch become easy, Mediatek would be glad to offer them a version of their GPU for the Switch and they will have the best one in the world, same goes for a discrete GPU if many want to buy one, mediatek would be pleased to make it.

Or a newcomer, they will be day one the best discrete GPU money can buy, for inference the competition will be a nightmare, from design to supply chain access to customer market access, you compete with the biggest company of world history, would be much easier in what had become in that world a niche affair without serious competition.
 
LukeTbk said:
Yes extremelly but how hard it is, is also how good the competition, in inference you have Grog/Cerebras that started a decade ago, Google/Nvidia has well and the giant Amazon/openAI/meta/SpaceX and so on.

Right now it is hard because you compete with ATI/AMD-Nvidia that have been doing it for 30 years+, if we become a world were everyone that was making gaming GPU leave for doing AI inference with their time and access to silicon, being the best option for a switch become easy, Mediatek would be glad to offer them a version of their GPU for the Switch and they will have the best one in the world, same goes for a discrete GPU if many want to buy one, mediatek would be pleased to make it.

Or a newcomer, they will be day one the best discrete GPU money can buy, for inference the competition will be a nightmare, from design to supply chain access to customer market access, you compete with the biggest company of world history, would be much easier in what had become in that world a niche affair without serious competition.
Click to expand...


And how's that newcomer's driver/game/development software support/refinement gonna be? (not good)

Be better to just throw Nvidia/AMD a pile of cash to make it for you vs a newcomer

If a newcomer has all the money and capability to do all that right - they're gonna chase the big money
 
kram182 said:
And how's that newcomer's driver/game/development software support/refinement gonna be? (not good)

Be better to just throw Nvidia/AMD a pile of cash to make it for you vs a newcomer
Click to expand...
Of course and AMD will continue to make gaming GPU would be my guess (as long as people buy them like Sony-Nintendo-PC gamers), that was a strange hypothetical world that a new comer took Nvidia-AMD market share in gaming because they left and thinking would they immediatly also leave that market to go into the inference one if they achieved to do that.

If they are alone in gaming that new commpany, does not mean they can become good easily in AI inference, the stack and silicon by then will be quite different than gaming gpu would be my guess, maybe they could quickly become good at the pre-fill step or some other, but the margin would be way worse were there is competition versus their niche.
 
LukeTbk said:
Of course and AMD will continue to make gaming GPU would be my guess (as long as people buy them like Sony-Nintendo-PC gamers), that was a strange hypothetical world that a new comer took Nvidia-AMD market share in gaming because they left and thinking would they immediatly also leave that market to go into the inference one if they achieved to do that.

If they are alone in gaming that new commpany, does not mean they can become good easily in AI inference, the stack and silicon by then will be quite different than gaming gpu would be my guess, maybe they could quickly become good at the pre-fill step or some other, but the margin would be way worse were there is competition versus their niche.
Click to expand...

They would follow/duplicate the trajectory of gaming>AI we've already seen the exiting/previous 'gaming only' companies take/make - at an accelerated pace as the path/plan/map has already been made for them by others

As I edited in above:

kram182 said:
If a newcomer has all the money and capability to do all that right - they're gonna chase the big money
Click to expand...
 
Margin will move around, if everyone leave gaming the margin for gaming hardware will be way higher than for the crowded AI inference, we see this with memory right now, https://onmsft.com/news/micron-makes-more-money-from-regular-dram-than-hbm-new-data-shows/, if they all do one way the people that stay in that market enjoy great pricing power.

Apple and Intel make superbe margin on non datacenter stuff right now for example, while AMD are a bit low on the datacenter GPU side of things (while Epyc are doing obviously great).

If there is demand, there will be offer.
 
LukeTbk said:
Margin will move around, if everyone leave gaming the margin for gaming hardware will be way higher than for the crowded AI inference, we see this with memory right now, https://onmsft.com/news/micron-makes-more-money-from-regular-dram-than-hbm-new-data-shows/, if they all do one way the people that stay in that market enjoy great pricing power.

Apple and Intel make superbe margin on non datacenter stuff right now for example, while AMD are a bit low on the datacenter GPU side of things (while Epyc are doing obviously great).

If there is demand, there will be offer.
Click to expand...

Again, equivalent to saying 'CXMT will save us' when they just ended up just chasing the money like I said

Intel is a datacenter player still as well, CPU and GPU (even if in 3rd place with GPU there behind AMD/Nvidia) - and to my point and as you are arguing for - INTEL - tried making it in the gaming GPU sector - how did that go? And someone less than Intel is gonna do better? If anything you guys already have what you're asking for, again - Intel.

Apple is even trying to get in on datacenter again after previously leaving it:

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/16/apple-may-return-to-server-market/

Again - people who want money go to where the money is.
 
Anyone thought that the prepurchase Ram may end up with data centers not built to be fire sold at a discount to get rid of it? Plus, GPUs? I've seen projects canceled with pallets sold at less than 1/10 the cost. Hell, the company I work for had a mega size (for them manufacturing facility) to be built on 100 acres of land, equipment prebought (huge assembly lines) now sitting in a warehouse, over 100 million dollars' worth of equipment becoming a place for spyders to catch their meals. It happens,
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top