^Indeed.

People who want to buy any CPU right now.

Well, the 5600X and 5800X have now pretty good availability, so that's not a good reason, as Rocket Lake doesn't have many advantages over the 5800X.

In fact, Ryzen 5600X and 5800X ~10% off on Alternate right now, so their availability can't be that bad.

I doubt these companies have any interest in the chance of a supply shock. If prices fall too much, cryptos could be dragged down with it because of a lowered entry barrier, and the market is flooded with used parts. Good luck explaining to your shareholders why your shiny new product is selling at hundreds of dollars lower than it was forecasted to sell.

Why bother selling large die GPUs at gaming prices when you have the chance to make it into a lucrative market with server-like margins instead?

But that has nothing to do with Nvidia nor AMD. They produce the chips and sell them to their AIB partners with fixes prices that have been stablished in contracts. They're only making more money because they're selling more chips.

It's the likes of Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, etc that are inflating the prices of their cards and then there are also the stores raising their prices even more to reap the profits of this whole crypto bullsh*t. They're the ones that will see their profits fall like a rock when/if the current crypto crazy ends and, to be honest, I don't give a fuck if they have problems because of that.

I'm not talking about the current cards, I'm talking about upcoming hardware. The gaming GPU market is not very profitable compared to the prosumer one, let alone the CPU market. And now, more than ever, they can hold the market on their own.

Not that Nvidia and AMD would abandon it outright, mind, but I fully expect future cards to be increasingly worse in terms of price vs. performance compared to former generations. It's a golden opportunity to eventually charge $500-1000 for a ~ 200 mm2 chip like in the CPU space.

Of course, a good theory has to allow some sort of prediction, so there you go: the upcoming Radeon cards, much like the vanilla 3060, will have a noticeably worse price vs. performance ratio compared to previous offerings.

The gaming market has never been as profitable as the prosumer one, and never will. That hasn't stopped AMD and Nvidia from launching better products with each new iteration. And given that the chips powering the gaming cards are derivated from the prosumer models (we'll have to see how this goes with AMD now that they've splitted their resources to develop for both sides "independently"), I doubt that push or improvement will slow down... at least because of crypto and greed. The limit to reduce the transistor size and how expensive the new nodes are may come into play soon but, as I said, this will have nothing to do with the mining.

Those CPU prices may not hold in the future either if Apple's move succeeds and apreads into the PC market, where Nvidia can follow suit thanks to their purchase of ARM. Maybe CPU prices will have to come down to become attractive to a part of the market. Then again, the Celeron and Athom brands already take care of them so who knows. Also, all PCs need a CPU to work, but GPUs are an add-on, a luxury that not everbody needs, and as such, they can ask more because of it.

We don't know how much the new 6700XT will cost (the non-XT version has been delayed), but it wouldn't surprise me if their MSRP is too high for what they offer. The 6800s and 6900s are already a bit (~$50) too expensive given how they perform. At least they should give better performance per dollar than the 5700 XT, because they're not going to ask for $449 for it, right?

Well the mining craze seems to be going down as the crypto prices are taking a nose dive so hopefully, the supply issues won't last for too much longer.

Also we have some i7-11700K benches from customers who got their cpus early. It's still pre-release so take it with a grain of salt but even when overclocked, it falls behind the 5000 series slightly in synthetics.

https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-core-i7-11700k-rocket-lake-s-already-shipping-to-first-customers

The whole negative press around cryptocurrencies right now certainly ain't helping either. Especially how inefficient they are in terms of power. Mining Bitcoins now apparently consumes as much energy as all of Argentina, which is a grand total of 121.36 TWh and enough to be part of the top 30 energy consuming nations if Bitcoin were a country.

So much power that could be used for better things...