TSMC Is All About Crypto Suddenly

rgMekanic

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The world's largest chip manufacturer, TSMC is producing chips exclusively for miners. James Wang, analyst for ARKInvest, formerly from NVIDIA tweeted today that Bitmain is now buying 20,000 16nm wafers a month from TSMC, which is more than NVIDIA. An article on Barron's yesterday, Christopher Rolland, Semiconductor Analyst at Susquehanna International Group states that the cryptocurrency boom has "substantial long-term risks for both companies as mining profitability may have induced 'false purchases' of more and higher-priced cards.”

It looks to me like we're charging into an interesting time when it comes to mining soon. With TSMC cranking out more and more silicon for companies building dedicated mining hardware. This could be a very good thing for gamers, as miners would/will be moving away from consumer cards and onto mining specific hardware.

Rolland, who has Neutral ratings on both AMD and Nvidia, cut his price target on AMD to $13 from $15, after concluding that many people are buying GPUs as "gamers," but then using the cards just 5% of the time to play video games and 95% of the time to mine crypto-currencies.
 
I have a GTX970, so I don't need to upgrade yet, but it's kind of annoying that if I wanted to, I can't.
There's nothing in stock, not even GTX 1080Ti
 
Well, as long as it doesn't cause shortage of supply for GPU
 
Naw man. Those wafers are straight-line computation chips aka ASICs.

GPUs will always provide the flexibility ASICs do not.

Until AMD / NVidia decide to recognize mining market demand, these shortages will always be felt.
 
This could be a very good thing for gamers, as miners would/will be moving away from consumer cards and onto mining specific hardware.
Unlikely, because your average Joe would rather buy a card that he can stick in his system and use as well as mine. On top of that, if the crypto market tanks a mining card is worthless, whereas a consumer card still retains a good portion of its value. There would have to be a significant performance advantage to using a dedicated mining card that offsets the risk of it becoming worthless. As long as it's profitable, average Joe will still buy the multi-use card.
 
Ugh... I'd really like to be able to buy a new video card.
I really NEED to buy a new video card for a build. The folks had another laptop crap out. I told them that I either build a desktop, or I'm done playing pc tech. I absolutely hate working with proprietary garbage.
 
Unlikely, because your average Joe would rather buy a card that he can stick in his system and use as well as mine. On top of that, if the crypto market tanks a mining card is worthless, whereas a consumer card still retains a good portion of its value. There would have to be a significant performance advantage to using a dedicated mining card that offsets the risk of it becoming worthless. As long as it's profitable, average Joe will still buy the multi-use card.

Your average Joe also isn't the ones buying semi trucks full of GPUs or hiring jets to fly them in.
 
Your average Joe also isn't the ones buying semi trucks full of GPUs or hiring jets to fly them in.

I just found out about that from a good friend in China. Some places are taking delivery of multiple containers of cards. Apparently most end up in countries under sanction.

Can't feed your people? Just buy thousands of video cards and farm coins to bypass sanctions!
 
Unlikely, because your average Joe would rather buy a card that he can stick in his system and use as well as mine. On top of that, if the crypto market tanks a mining card is worthless, whereas a consumer card still retains a good portion of its value. There would have to be a significant performance advantage to using a dedicated mining card that offsets the risk of it becoming worthless. As long as it's profitable, average Joe will still buy the multi-use card.

Yup this is me.
I started mining years ago as a way to make use of my computer when I wasn't using it.

Now have a 1060 3GB in my multi use pc and just now built a 1080ti mining rig.

But I only did that because I'll use it in a new multipurpose pc when/if mining crashes.

Versatility is the name of the game. For me at least
 
I have the money to buy the card that I want but I can't find one!!! I even have alerts for when cards come in stock but if you don't move immediately (and I do mean immediately), the stock will have been bought up within minutes. Yes, I said minutes.
 
this wont free up gpus. asics are specific to certain coins. a lot of coins cant be mined on asics by design. for that reason, there will always be gpu demand by miners.
 
They will only move if the prices are competitive.. If they charge $6000 per unit, miners will still buy GPU's..
 
this wont free up gpus. asics are specific to certain coins. a lot of coins cant be mined on asics by design. for that reason, there will always be gpu demand by miners.

FYI, there really isn't anything that a CPU/GPU can do faster than a fixed function ASIC. It is basically impossible to design an algorithm that will work on GPUs but won't work on FF ASIC. As an example, the NSA has been custom designing ASICs for what they consider important crypto algorithms for decades and they have ASICs for even esoteric algorithms. About the only option to make ASICs somewhat non-viable is to use an algorithm that relies on an absolutely ridiculous memory requirement (we talking TBs, any memory size you can find on a PC or GPU can easily be done for an ASIC).

Basically, if they don't have or aren't working on an ASIC for a coin, that's simply because the coin is too small to matter.
 
This is against the idea of "mining should be able with any household GPU to fight monopolies". I wonder what the outcome will be.

A GPU can be sold, after 6-12month, what do you do with a miner card with no video out once its obsolete ? scrap metal ?
 
FYI, there really isn't anything that a CPU/GPU can do faster than a fixed function ASIC. It is basically impossible to design an algorithm that will work on GPUs but won't work on FF ASIC. As an example, the NSA has been custom designing ASICs for what they consider important crypto algorithms for decades and they have ASICs for even esoteric algorithms. About the only option to make ASICs somewhat non-viable is to use an algorithm that relies on an absolutely ridiculous memory requirement (we talking TBs, any memory size you can find on a PC or GPU can easily be done for an ASIC).

Basically, if they don't have or aren't working on an ASIC for a coin, that's simply because the coin is too small to matter.

Some coins by design are ASIC resistant. In simple terms the coins are designed to require lots of memory/memory bandwidth that ASICs lack. You will never see an ASIC for Ethereum for example.

So don’t get your hopes for for miner gpu demand to drop because of this.
 
Naw man. Those wafers are straight-line computation chips aka ASICs.

GPUs will always provide the flexibility ASICs do not.

Until AMD / NVidia decide to recognize mining market demand, these shortages will always be felt.

I agree.

Flexibility also means slower speed. This is why our most flexible part of our system, the CPU, is not used for video games.

But this also means as the computational complexity of the block chain increases this hardware becomes useless because it's no longer profitable versus the electricity and you can't really resell it like a video card.

This whole crypto currency mining thing is a bit of a house of cards. If too many people get into it, or the government puts down the ban hammer, the whole thing will come falling down.
 
Some coins by design are ASIC resistant. In simple terms the coins are designed to require lots of memory/memory bandwidth that ASICs lack. You will never see an ASIC for Ethereum for example.

So don’t get your hopes for for miner gpu demand to drop because of this.

It is pretty simple to give an ASIC a lot of memory and memory bandwidth. ASICs can literally do anything GPUs or CPUs or hell even FPGAs can do in that regard. There are plenty of ASICs out there with HBM for instance (Google's Gen 2 TPU for instance has 600 GB/s of bandwidth). And ASIC for Ethereum wouldn't be that hard to do, it is basically SHA3 based and if a GPU can handle the memory requirements then so can an ASIC.
 
Some coins by design are ASIC resistant. In simple terms the coins are designed to require lots of memory/memory bandwidth that ASICs lack. You will never see an ASIC for Ethereum for example.

So don’t get your hopes for for miner gpu demand to drop because of this.

ASIC- Application Specific Integrated Circuit. In other words you can TUNE your chip for the particular application. There is zero reason why you can't design an ASIC that has a good memory bandwidth.
 
Yeah, I just bought one. Unbelievable.
What’s amazing is that with performance a touch above a 1080ti (I know very small diff) a new Titan xP at 1200 is a better buy that a 1300 dollar 1080ti. For gaming. Hilarious!
 
ASIC- Application Specific Integrated Circuit. In other words you can TUNE your chip for the particular application. There is zero reason why you can't design an ASIC that has a good memory bandwidth.

You are right, it could be designed. Would it be cost effective? No. That’s why it hasn’t been designed.
 
I just love how folks are trying to get rich on nothing. Hopefully this bubble will soon burst. Yeah, GPU prices are just beyond ridiculous. Folks are asking $1300-1500 for a 1080ti, pure insanity...
 
You are right, it could be designed. Would it be cost effective? No. That’s why it hasn’t been designed.

No it would be cost effective and power effective compared to GPUs, the issue is simply that in the past, outside of bitcoin there wasn't a lot of money in the other coins.
 
It's past time that AMD and Nvidia made mining only cards.
They would sell every damn one of them. Just saturate the market.


Then and only then would a mainstream card become affordable and justifiable for use in PC gaming.
 
It's past time that AMD and Nvidia made mining only cards.
They would sell every damn one of them. Just saturate the market.


Then and only then would a mainstream card become affordable and justifiable for use in PC gaming.

The only mining cards released so far have ZERO resale value and cost more than a standard gaming GPU. The only thing redeeming about them is a custom ROM to emphasize power efficiency over speed and a warranty that covers custom ROM burns. So they weren't that appealing given the markup.
 
I'm afraid to buy a Titan Xp right now with Volta out and now GDDR6 being available. I just know I'll end up with remorse in a few months. Fortunately is it's been 2 years and I am interested in a gaming card that's price has horrible ROI for miners.
 
LoL I just realized how lucky I am that I managed to get an Asus 1080Ti at normal price just before Christmas..
 
More accurate to say TSMC will make whatever you pay them to, which has always been their business model. If you are paying, they'll fab it. They don't give a shit what it is for. That's what foundries for hire do. You design a chip, they make it. They take orders from anyone who can pay, and who has a valid design for their process.
 
It's past time that AMD and Nvidia made mining only cards.
They would sell every damn one of them. Just saturate the market.


Then and only then would a mainstream card become affordable and justifiable for use in PC gaming.
Not gonna happen. Not their business model, no upside for them, introduces unnecessary risk to their IP and pricing, and ultimately they don't need to make a gimped card because they're already selling every ungimped one.

If you guys think the tears are flowing now, just wait til Volta launches and you can't even get a 2080 for 2k.
 
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amd and nvidia are making a HUGE mistake by not reconizing mining. they have the opertunity to make quite abit if they did now. but more importantly if mining implodes (the ethereum fork may do it) there will be a massive flood of used cards and only people decidated to bying new will even touch the stock. If that happens they will suffer a massive loss in demand that they could have offset with extra profit from now. I feel the smart thing to do would be take preorders @msrp. then immidiatly ramp production up to deal with the demad (it will be HUGE righht now) if they do that they no longer have the issue of getting stuck with a massive amount of unsold cards.
 
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