Impact on GFX manufacturers?

[triox]

Not sure if it's the right board or if it's been already discussed, apologies if so, but:

with all the talk about top ATI cards being sold out throughout the western world, do you guys think that the card manufacturers actually take notice of bitcoin phenomenon, or is it not even a blip on ATI's and NVidia's radar?
How about manufacturers, like MSI, Saphire and others?
Do you think they are working on custom chips?
Do they realize that they have a interest on helping to keep BTC alive?

[kokojie]

They won't, retail GPU is about 10% of their revenue (90% is from OEM, majority of people buy their PC from big brand PC makers like HP/Dell).

Out of the 10% retail GPU, maybe 20-30% is bought by bitcoin miners.

[rograz]

They might notice an increase in the high end products since a bigger portion of them are sold retail rather than to OEMs, however the high end market is a drop in a bucket compared to overall GPU sales when it comes to number of cards sold.

[Raulo]

however the high end market is a drop in a bucket compared to overall GPU sales when it comes to number of cards sold.

On the other hand, high-end market has much higher profit margin and Bitcoin-related sales will be a bit more than a drop in the bucket profit-wise.

[fascistmuffin]

Do they realize that they have a interest on helping to keep BTC alive?

They probably don't want to have any association with bitcoin, especially with the way the news is spinning the BTC stories. It's probably not in their interests at all since the average computer OEM consumer doesn't know much about bitcoin other than what major news tells them (drug trading, money laundering).

[Jack of Diamonds]

They won't, retail GPU is about 10% of their revenue (90% is from OEM, majority of people buy their PC from big brand PC makers like HP/Dell).

Out of the 10% retail GPU, maybe 20-30% is bought by bitcoin miners.

Precisely. The vast majority of all sold AMD/Nvidia graphics cards are low to midrange cards for OEM computers, such as Radeon 5450, GT 420, Radeon 5750, GTX 460 etc.

They are also used as dumping pits for excess VRAM chips, so you may see an absurd amount like 2GB of memory on a GT420 for OEM use. It's a very profitable business.

Consider that these 2 companies sell tens of millions of graphics cards per year. Bitcoin users buy maybe 20,000-30k GPU's top
(which is still optimistic, seeing as most people use their pre-bought rigs, and some still mine on CPU's, few people actually build farms).

Ok, miners tend to buy high end cards which is a plus for their bottom line.
But it's still a drop in the ocean for them to care. Gamers and Eyefinity users still buy the majority of those.

[triox]

What about smaller brand manufacturers, like XFX, Gigabyte, HIS and others? Surely it must be somewhat bigger of a deal for them?
And by supporting BTC I don't mean necessarily any kind of an official campaign, maybe a slow and quiet reinvestment into the BTC market, to help keep the price growing and mining profitable.

[Gabi]

They won't, retail GPU is about 10% of their revenue (90% is from OEM, majority of people buy their PC from big brand PC makers like HP/Dell).

Out of the 10% retail GPU, maybe 20-30% is bought by bitcoin miners.

 

There are like 30000 GPUs mining now, i think it's more like 0.5% of retail GPU...

[Synaesthesia]

Remember that the GPU market is hugely skewed towards the budget side of things. The biggest manufacturer of GPU's is by far Intel! The 30000 GPU's you mention would likely be higher-end units which sell but a fraction of the volume.. Even taking that into account though - I don't think Bitcoin doesn't have an effect on the GPU market as a whole, nor on the development of GPU's for computation IMO. It's just too small.

It's clearly had an effect on the market pricing & availability of ATi 5xxx and 6xxx series cards though.

[bcpokey]

Remember that the GPU market is hugely skewed towards the budget side of things. The biggest manufacturer of GPU's is by far Intel! The 30000 GPU's you mention would likely be higher-end units which sell but a fraction of the volume.. Even taking that into account though - I don't think Bitcoin doesn't have an effect on the GPU market as a whole, nor on the development of GPU's for computation IMO. It's just too small.

It's clearly had an effect on the market pricing & availability of ATi 5xxx and 6xxx series cards though.

Wrongola. This thread has been discussed multiple times before so I'm just going to bulletpoint without providing sources this time

6xxx series cards pricing and availability is unchanged since the boom of bitcoin. Even the fabled (and terrible $/hash) 6990.

5xxx series cards pricing actually came down around bitcoin boom time (sapphire 5850/5830 extreme were cheaper than any 58xx before). Availability I suppose decreased. The biggest factor for both though is that they're last generation gpus, no longer in production. Manufacturers were dumping their last stock. I suppose you could say it affected the used market though, that'd be fair.

The 58xx series are not really budget cards, nor were they ever. Yet AMD sold 16+million of them in the first 9 months after release. So... once again, bitcoin means nothing to either AMD or xfx/sapphire/etc. They're not going to make special orders for you, or restart fabbing for the 30,000 bitcoiners.

[Hawkix]

Are there 5870 GPU chips in manufacturer stocks still? I suppose not. Otherwise, I would bet that Sapphire or Gigabyte could sell them very easily ..

[bcpokey]

Are there 5870 GPU chips in manufacturer stocks still? I suppose not. Otherwise, I would bet that Sapphire or Gigabyte could sell them very easily ..

AMD is the only GPU manufacturer and they are not producing/stockpiling them.

As for the pcb makers, well, it's unknown what they have, but very unlikely that they are sitting on a big pile of last generation chips, as they have all the designs and components and can easily whip out another batch if they saw a demand for it.

[V2-V3]

I work with large GFX card manufacturers very closely and they have not noticed any increase in sales due to mining, mainly because the rush is for used cards and older end of life generations.
What is bought of the current generation cards is nothing when compared to the gaming market.

[dinker]

There will be a New RaBeon 7000B series.
It will come with 4 GPU on a single card + 128MB memory.

Also it works in either X1 X4 X16 slots

[PandaMiner]

do they even make a high end card with an 1x "foot" ?

[Jack of Diamonds]

do they even make a high end card with an 1x "foot" ?

They don't make "any" graphics card with a 1x connector. All PCI-e graphics cards have a x16 connector.

There is a way to use them on x4, x8 and x1 lanes though; By using adapters.

[fitty]

Not sure if it's the right board or if it's been already discussed, apologies if so, but:

with all the talk about top ATI cards being sold out throughout the western world, do you guys think that the card manufacturers actually take notice of bitcoin phenomenon, or is it not even a blip on ATI's and NVidia's radar?
How about manufacturers, like MSI, Saphire and others?
Do you think they are working on custom chips?
Do they realize that they have a interest on helping to keep BTC alive?

They've noticed there is no question.

It's not just the raw sales. As other people mentioned, it might be 1-3% boost. Just looking at some of the top online retailers, it's extremely hard to get quite a few of the ati models and nvidia from what I've seen doesn't have any stock issues. It might be 1-3% so it's not a game changer.

But the bigger boost is people seeing ATI as badass and nvidia as "slow as hell". If you google around there's lots of people recommending ATI and tell people not to get nvidia. It might be or might not be obvious to people researching it's from a bitcoin perspective. There is no question a perception shift between the two brands and I'm sure the ATI folks are quite pleased with it.

Will either company make any changes to help/hurt bitcoin? I doubt it. But the fact 10,000s of people are out there saying ATI is 5-10x faster, oh don't buy an nvidia card does have an effect. It's free advertising and when it's all about speed (gaming) people are probably going to lean more towards ATI next purchase then Nvidia's offering. Very few people even know why ATI is faster, they just know that they are.

[Bitonetta]

They won't, retail GPU is about 10% of their revenue (90% is from OEM, majority of people buy their PC from big brand PC makers like HP/Dell).

Out of the 10% retail GPU, maybe 20-30% is bought by bitcoin miners.

 

There are like 30000 GPUs mining now, i think it's more like 0.5% of retail GPU...

Haha, I was about to say the same thing.  I would be surprised if miners purchase even 1% out of that 10% retail total.  At best, miners may even show up as a % of their sales charts but it won't be significant.  It'll be within their margin of error and it's highly doubtful that they'll take notice or change course based on that.

[Sannyasi]

gaming is how i found out about bitcoin.... well- i'm more into modding than playing games but same group

[Cluster2k]

It's not just the raw sales. As other people mentioned, it might be 1-3% boost. Just looking at some of the top online retailers, it's extremely hard to get quite a few of the ati models and nvidia from what I've seen doesn't have any stock issues. It might be 1-3% so it's not a game changer.

If people want the old generation 5xxx cards there is a problem in getting stock (obviously), but in Australia we have no problem getting as many 6950, 6970, and 6990 cards as required.  Is Australia siphoning all the stock headed for the USA? 

Bitcoin is barely a blip on ATI's radar.  They sell far more to the OEM market.  Second is the enthusiast market for gaming.  Then comes the Stream (and CUDA for nVidia) market for scientific computing.  Bitcoin brings up the rear.  The current hash rate is equivalent to 36,000 non overclocked 6950 cards.  I'm sure ATI ships millions of GPUs per year.  A few tens of thousands isn't worth worrying about, especially for something like Bitcoin where users may lose interest.