If you believed the rumors AMD and Nvidia had to make a lot of impressive CES announcements. Rumors that Nvidia would announce an RTX 3080 Ti or an RTX 3070 Super. Rumors that AMD would launch its RX 6700 at the end of this month. Even Intel was silent on the status of its discrete Xe GPUs, although it still had its fair share of announcements about new CPUs for desktops and laptops. Laptop manufacturers seemed more confident in their ability to meet demand, at least in the coming months. availabilty. After that, it’s down to how well each company has planned its production schedule in order to keep inventory on the shelves – and, well, I don’t trust that with a imminent shortage of chips and everything.
During a normal CES year, we may have heard more about these MIA graphics cards, but teasing potential buyers if they are likely to wait long past the launch date to get one? Not a good idea. Both AMD and Nvidia were also already announcing the biggest and best things for the new year, so there really wasn’t much more to announce that would spark excitement.
Most AMD’s 50-minute keynote was recorded with testimonials from the CEOs of other companies praising Ryzen CPUs and how they have benefited their business. It’s no mystery that AMD has damn good processors, and graphics cards too. But it seemed like AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series processors got more fanfare last year. Maybe it was because of some unique laptops, such as the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, would be the first she would have. Or it was the first time that AMD had a strong, viable alternative to Intel’s mobile processors, even though the company made mobile processors for years before that.
This time it felt like AMD had glazed the specs of its new mobile processors, and even performance compared to the previous generation and Intel equivalents. The only announcement AMD made regarding graphics cards was the mobile versions of its new RDNA 2 cards, which will be released sometime in the first half of 2021.
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Nvidia’s formal CES announcement was shorter and less overwhelming than AMD’s. The only desktop GPU announced was the RTX 3060, which prompted a lot of people watch the stream on YouTube typing OUT OF STOCK in chat. It was also largely believed that the RTX 3080, 3070, and 3060 would be coming to laptops, so that announcement wasn’t such a big surprise when it hit. It was more or less expected.
Nvidia announced that a few games were getting DLSS and ray tracing, and it talked about the Resizable bar on the 30 series cards – Nvidia and Intel’s answer to AMD’s Smart Access Memory to increase the frame rate in some games – but nothing else came out. (Of course, it would be nice to have the option enabled on 20 Series cards, as 30 Series are so hard to find from anyone other than scalpers.)
The more interesting tidbits came in the form of a Q&A roundtable with AMD CEO Lisa Su, to which only a limited number of press was invited. But many of the questions, according to Dr. Ian Cutress, revolved around supply and demand. Su told attendees that the chip shortage is “the result of a demand-driven environment, not manufacturing problems.”
Su went on to say she did not believe the shortage would limit AMD’s market share, but increased demand has not only put pressure on foundries to make more chips, but has also created a problem with sourcing the raw materials. – something Su said could go on. through 2021. There is a lot of priority logistics between the number of chips these companies have for end-users and OEMs, but Su assured that it is a top priority for AMD to get more chips in the hands of consumers.
Speak on the 19th Annual JP Morgan Tech Auto Forum Conference On January 12, 2021, Nvidia also addressed the chip shortage, saying it expects inventory to “ remain lean ” through the end of March 2021 in both online and brick-and-mortar retail markets. “Our total capacity has not been able to keep up with the overall strong demand we’ve seen,” said Nvidia CFO Colette Kress. Interestingly, Kress said crypto miners have not played a major role in the GPU demand that is currently going on.
In some of our own conversations with laptop sellers over the past week, most said there would be enough new product to meet the demand during the initial wave of purchases. But in a conversation with Acer, a spokesperson told us supplies could be tight after that first wave. So again, there is a similar problem with laptop vendors as with chip manufacturers. (Laptop sellers need the chipmaker’s parts.) In contrast, an MSI spokesperson told us that delivery shouldn’t be a problem for his new laptops because of the weekly scheduled shipments coming in. How many weeks those shipments are scheduled, MSI did not say.
From a logistics point of view, it can take a while for consumers to see that the products they want to buy are filling the shelves when supply and demand start to match. Many companies prefer to ship their products via ocean freight because it is cheaper, but it usually takes a month or a little longer for everything to arrive in US ports. Shipping by air is of course faster, but a lot more expensive, and depending on the weather conditions in the country as we get further into the winter, some areas may experience longer delays than others. (It didn’t take me long to work in the semiconductor industry to find out that some of the shipping part is perhaps the most crucial.)
But while many of us hardware enthusiasts are likely to feel somewhat drained after this week’s CES announcements, it’s probably for the best that AMD and Nvidia haven’t raised our expectations too much – other than the big GPU and some other announcements for when they ‘ I will land harder. I expect delivery of the RTX 3060 GPUs to be as fast as any other before. Scalpers will likely continue to worsen the supply / demand situation and annoy legitimate PC builders and parents who are still trying to get a new laptop for their child’s virtual school. Crypto miners are also likely to fight hard to get all the cards they can. It is currently the circle of silicon life. The only thing we can do if we don’t need a new GPU, CPU, laptop or whatever, be patient.