When CFO of Nvidia, Colette Kress, announced at the end of 2020 that it would take “several months” to resolve the availability of graphics cards, Asus apparently did not expect this solution to mean even lower delivery volumes. This is exactly what the company’s representative announced at the financial conference: “In the GPU segment, we are most pressed by the GPU deficit from Nvidia. We recorded a quarter-on-quarter [Q4 2020->Q1 2021] decline in supply. Due to unavailability, we are seeing an increase in prices. “
According to analyst firm Jon Peddie Reasearch, Nvidia shipped just over 9 million graphics chips in the fourth quarter. Even this amount was not enough to meet demand; however, according to Asus, deliveries fell further in the first quarter. The total number for the first quarter has not yet been calculated with regard to the days remaining until the end of March.
Nvidia Ampere GA102 core
Much of the current demand is due to the interest of cryptocurrers, for whom Nvidia graphics cards are currently the ideal solution: High arithmetic performance in FP32 operations, wider bus competition and faster memory (GDDR6X on higher models) bring benefits while lower memory capacity (8GB and allegedly planned 6GB cards) does not bring restrictions. However, Asus admits that he has no idea how many cards he makes end up with players and how many in “mining harvesters”.
Nvidia’s portfolio should be enriched in the coming months with GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and GeForce RTX 3050 Ti, leaving room for combinations of stream processors and bus widths that have not yet been on the market and for which the corresponding GPU pieces have been stored. In the case of the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti, it will be a new smaller GPU GA107, whose yield in terms of the number of pieces produced from one wafer will be higher than in more expensive models (which should have a positive effect on the number of shipped GPUs).
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