It was an open secret and one of the main themes of the whole problem of shortages and crisis of chips at NVIDIA, but now it seems to be more transparent and official. Despite the fact that we have been with the RTX 30 in stores for more than a year and despite the fact that at the beginning Samsung was complying with NVIDIA, the reality is that the post-pandemic lawsuit has ended up prosecuting the South Korean giant: there won’t be enough stock of RTX 30 for everyone.
It is not that you have to worry about how the market is, GPUs are on the shelves, the problem is that the price drop will not occur if the market is not flooded with models and they are not sold, so at some point they will start bidding and competition to the downside between manufacturers. It is clear that nobody wants to lose and that all materials and components, as well as transport, have risen in price, but forget about this supply, Samsung has been planted.
Samsung can’t cope, NVIDIA resigns
If we look back we will remember that NVIDIA’s forced strategy seemed like a good plan, but it has not ended up being that way because the pandemic has changed everything. Huang’s work with the two largest in the sector: TSMC and Samsung, where the former make the chips for the GA100 at 7 nm, which is giving such good results, while Samsung deals with the entire gaming range, achieving a powerful client.
The lithographic process of 8 nm is a direct evolution of 10 nm of the South Koreans, so there should be no major issue in terms of yield per wafer and supply everywhere, but this is not being the case. The number of units agreed with NVIDIA is being met, but the demand is much higher and Samsung, with its mature process, does not have enough production capacity.
The node and the number of RTX 30 are considered lost
Samsung is not focused on expanding the production capacity of this node through new Fabs. On the other hand, and contrary to popular belief, it is about to build several more for the following high-performance nodes. That is, it will not meet the production rate that NVIDIA requires and therefore the supply of RTX 30 GPUs will be the same until the company closes the tap to give life to the RTX 40 with 5 nm TSMC.
Or what is the same, there will not be enough stock of cards as prices fall and settle, which is dated for the end of summer 2022 if everything runs its course. The change in the way Ethereum works will bring many second-hand GPUs from mining, prompting the purchase of users and reducing sales in stores, so the stock should increase and with it begin the discounts seeing that the shelves continue with drives and replacement is coming.
These are the two great expectations of users, whether they are fulfilled or not is very uncertain, but it is the daunting scenario that we have before us. Meanwhile, prices do not stop rising and with it the reluctance to buy, where if we do a quick scout to the stores we will see that it is difficult to find a model without units, the never seen before …