Just in - Hope for an end to the GPU shortage comes from an unexpected source

HAL_404

HAL_404

[H]ard|Gawd
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Dec 16, 2018
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"When dedicated hardware does the job so much better, GPUs could lose their appeal.
The Chinese mining firm, Bitmain, has released a teaser for its upcoming
ASIC Antminer E9 Etherum mining box. This is potentially good news for PC gamers
because the Antminer E9 is much better at mining Ethereum than even the best
graphics cards out there, with a hash rate of 3 GH/s—that's equivalent to
32 GeForce RTX 3080's"

Used GTX 1060 6GB GPU currently selling for $400 :eek: so here's to hoping ...

https://www.pcgamer.com/hope-for-an-end-to-the-gpu-shortage-comes-from-an-unexpected-source/
 
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Ethereum asics have existed for awhile. The problem is its a memory heavy algo so they still have to sourse high end memory chips in addition to the asic. Idk how hard it is to sourse that currently.

3gh/s sounds like fud judging by what previous asics have been able to do on ether.
 
The thing about that thing is it's gonna cost 5 figures. I saw another article about it. It has the equivalent mining power of 32 3080s, uses the electricity of about ten, so it's actually a good deal on that front, but the article also said "if the price drops to $20,000-30,000 it'd pay for itself in so many days." So it may not actually be a replacement price-wise.
 
Unless they can make enough of them that GPU mining stops being profitable, all it will do is make the supply worse by sucking up some of the GDDR supply.
 
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With a high price and low supply I don't see this mining box making a meaningful impact anytime soon. Besides, there are other coins that can be gpu mined for a profit besides eth.
 
Don't see it happening. Its too expensive. Graphics cards have an upside, if crypto takes a dip, miners sell off the graphics cards. With those, they're stuck with them.
 
Krenum said:
Don't see it happening. Its too expensive. Graphics cards have an upside, if crypto takes a dip, miners sell off the graphics cards. With those, they're stuck with them.
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The other article I read claimed the break even point on these was 30 days at current rates versus 90-120 for current GPUs which would make resale a whole lot less important. The real question is availability and unfortunately I doubt they can produce enough to reduce demand by much, it'll likely take another crash before graphics cards are widely available again.
 
OP is obsessed with this topic.

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The other problem is manufacturing/scale - the capacity to make chips is finite and demand exceeds supply. I doubt these guys will be able to get their ASIC made in any significant quantity to matter.
 
DoubleTap said:
The other problem is manufacturing/scale - the capacity to make chips is finite and demand exceeds supply. I doubt these guys will be able to get their ASIC made in any significant quantity to matter.
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And by the time they're available to the public the ROI will be destroyed anyway. Is there ever a case when people are able to by and have them in-hand when peak profitability hits?
 
Armenius said:
And by the time they're available to the public the ROI will be destroyed anyway. Is there ever a case when people are able to by and have them in-hand when peak profitability hits?
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Why do that when the company making the asic can take money (non refundable crypto) in advance for the preorder mine on the hardware when they get it then ship it out later? Isnt that the way of asic manufacturers?
 
cdabc123 said:
Why do that when the company making the asic can take money (non refundable crypto) in advance for the preorder mine on the hardware when they get it then ship it out later? Isnt that the way of asic manufacturers?
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Yes, just like GPUs - they print money so why would you sell them? If you decide to sell them - there's a reason - a high price or that future profitability does not look as good (ETH 2.0).
 
sk3tch said:
Yes, just like GPUs - they print money so why would you sell them? If you decide to sell them - there's a reason - a high price or that future profitability does not look as good (ETH 2.0).
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Because of scale, they need to sell and turn a profit on initial orders to keep trucking. In other words they probably don’t have the capital to just R&D, manufacture, pay for thousands of theses things electricity, etc at the same time then hope that that tens of millions of dollars pays itself off in 30 days. They are off loading the risk.
 
next-Jin said:
Because of scale, they need to sell and turn a profit on initial orders to keep trucking. In other words they probably don’t have the capital to just R&D, manufacture, pay for thousands of theses things electricity, etc at the same time then hope that that tens of millions of dollars pays itself off in 30 days. They are off loading the risk.
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Right - that's why these are for sale now - versus in December. They made good money, now they're balancing the risk of ETH 2.0 to capitlize further.
 
Armenius said:
And by the time they're available to the public the ROI will be destroyed anyway. Is there ever a case when people are able to by and have them in-hand when peak profitability hits?
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Yes. The first batch of a new ASIC is almost always profitable, by design. Peak profitability (let's call it yield, because anyone that knows WTF they're doing isn't sweating fluctuations of a token against its fiat/$USD value) is during the pre-mine where the ASICs are usually run by manufacturer until a carefully calculated crossover point, at which time they're shipped out to first batch of pre-orders.

Most people casually observing mining aren't really the market for ASIC miners, since they require an appetite for risk, significant capital, facilities/power/cooling, and the ability to create your own outcome models for continuous data analysis. YOLO'ing into buying ASICs will likely end badly.

The ASIC metagame really comes down to a chess match between you and the data analysts at the ASIC miner manufacturer- they're extremely sharp and have staggering capital.

The additional downside with ASICs is they do need to breakeven to ROI since they'll be useless once they can't beat electricity cost.

GPUs on the other hand don't have to breakeven to ROI (still a common misconception), GPUs only have to beat depreciation.
 
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1_rick said:
The thing about that thing is it's gonna cost 5 figures. I saw another article about it. It has the equivalent mining power of 32 3080s, uses the electricity of about ten, so it's actually a good deal on that front, but the article also said "if the price drops to $20,000-30,000 it'd pay for itself in so many days." So it may not actually be a replacement price-wise.
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The efficiency benefit is largely moot here since the operations/locales that are buying ASIC setups don't care much about energy costs.

sk3tch said:
Right - that's why these are for sale now - versus in December. They made good money, now they're balancing the risk of ETH 2.0 to capitlize further.
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And you have a few big sellers who are flooding the channel and keeping their prices fixed.

Top tip for anyone looking to avoid buying a mining card: Are they relatively new and only deal in used GPUs? If so, it's likely a larger operation obfuscating themselves through a purpose-created Ebay account (kind of like a shell company) to move used rig cards.
 
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