Cryptocurrency miners are now influencing the fortunes of the world's biggest chipmaker. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is responsible for over half of the world's market for chips, and it's the world's largest contract manufacturer. Today it reported revenues (pdf) driven by demand from cryptocurrency miners for the second consecutive quarter.
TSMC management were cagey about the exact contribution from crypto miners in the fourth quarter, declining to give specifics when questioned by investors. But its chief financial officer, Lorna Ho named "continuing demand for cryptocurrency mining" as one of two growth factors for the quarter, major mobile product launches being the other. In the previous reporting period, co-chief executive officer Mark Liu told investors that it received $350 to $400 million in revenue from crypto miners.
I am very glad that I had GPUs before this wave of miners hit. I am even more glad that I have AIO cooled cards with good VRM cooling.
I am even more glad that my cards are able to make so much "money" so efficiently and that there are a bunch of people willing to buy what amounts to used electricity while I'm at work, and that it happened in the dead of winter.
It is unfortunate that this is killing the market stone dead, as I know a few people that wanted to upgrade, but the good news is I guess they can use their current cards to help pay for new ones when it inevitably "crashes" again.
I guess I'll be sitting on my RX480 for a while longer I suppose. Oh well, the games I play run fine enough at 1080p on it, and I don't really have any issues playing Warframe on my XBox.
checked local pc store in slovakia. every amd card above 120eur sold out. every nvidia card above 150eur sold out. checked out a large store HQd in czechia. same situation with barely few dozen cards above said price
its like commie era all over again. everything is sold out
PS: just checked largest second hand internet market in my country. cards are on sale with fixed price and with some surcharge.
no idea how this will end. ram prices are crazy too, gpus are not even in store. terrible. is this permanent or just temporary?
My 1080tis are on track to get north of 350/mo with just $30 in electric bill (16 hours a day). A well tuned 6-card Vega is a solid part time job, AFTER electric bill.
They supply the demand; it hardly matters where that demand is coming from, unless it looks like it won't be sustainable...but as these are mutli-function commodity parts, they can always be used for something.
Except Wall Street is still here and so is crypto mining so get used to it. This isn't going away anytime soon but like I said, in an another thread, these people are making record profit and they are not going to budge. I guess this maybe a time to push integraded graphics gaming lol
Bitcoin is one crypto among thousands (though not all are proof-of-work based) and no one is using consumer hardware to mine Bitcoin.
Bitcoin could vanish from the face of the Earth tomorrow and it would be a mild speed bump...that would likely spawn further increases in demand as more technically meritorious cryptos were able to fill the vacuum.
What really concerns me is that there won't be a PC gaming market in the future.
I'm not in the market to build a gaming PC now as I'm saving up for a build in 2019, but if this trend continues then there won't be a PC gaming market to sell to. It's not a matter of "game later", it's more of a matter of "never game again on a PC"...
You can mine on consoles just the same, install Linux and mine away, they have GPUs similar to RX 580. Consoles have been ripped and used by computing as cheap replacement of PCs, their controllers used by army because people couldn't figure out the silly controllers army used otherwise, etc. Consoles are no more immune than PC components, they are one and the same these days anyway, a console is a branded PC running x86 and same GPUs.
They are afraid to claim their profit comes from mining because of how volatile that profit is and as a result investors could easily swing any way.
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