By the way, remember the Samsung monitor that was stupidly expensive? Well, we now have info about its brother from Acer, with a place-holder price that roughly half that of Samsung:

Acer EI491CRG9 with 49″ Ultrawide VA Panel, 240Hz Refresh Rate, Mini LED Backlight and HDR2000
https://www.tftcentral.co.uk/blog/acer-ei491crg9-with-49-ultrawide-va-panel-240hz-refresh-rate-mini-led-backlight-and-hdr2000/
Recently we brought you the news of Samsung’s new Odyssey G9v2 (as we called it), an update to their popular 49″ ultrawide G9 display, keeping the same large screen format, 5120 x 1440 resolution and 240Hz refresh rate, but now combining it with an impressive Mini LED backlight with >2000 local dimming zones. Information appeared for this screen on Chinese retailer taobao, often early to announce details of new screens before they even appear from the manufacturer. Taobao have now also released information on what is expected to be Acer’s equivalent display, the EI491CRG9 (note the cheeky use of “G9” in the title there!) Take this information as not fully confirmed, but it should give you a decent overview of what to expect from this new screen.
(...)
The pricing on Taobao should probably be taken with a pinch of salt as this is very early information and could change. It’s listed at 14999 RMB, which is about $2300 USD. That’s certainly more sensible than the $4600 place-holder pricing for the Samsung alternative. Further confirmation of pricing and regional availability when we get it.

Still crazy expensive, tho.

MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Ventus 3X 12GB spotted during transit

https://videocardz.com/newz/msi-geforce-rtx-3080-ti-ventus-3x-12gb-spotted-during-transit

Probably going directly to miners


Cryptocurrency mining has started eroding graphics card warranties in some territories

"MSI seemed to be going down a similar route as well, with a document from MSI Russia showing it has decided to reduce the warranties of 19 cards down to just six months. The first few cards on this list are all mining cards, but then gaming versions pop up, like the GeForce RTX 3070 Ventus 3X OC, and it's suddenly not only affecting cryptocurrency miners. Gigabyte has released a mining card that has a warranty of just 90 days."

https://www.pcgamer.com/cryptocurrency-mining-has-started-eroding-graphics-card-warranties-in-some-territories/

While I can sorta get the mining GPUs having a short warranty cause they are new (and even then, that's kinda crazy), Msi slashing warranties for gaming gpus is pretty nonsense. I am assuming it doesn't affect the ones that are already in gamers hands however.


Alienware Really Doesn't Want You to Buy an AMD Ryzen PC

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/321919-alienware-really-doesnt-want-you-to-buy-an-amd-ryzen-pc

Alienware does a lot of shady things that make it seem like Intel is the better system. Like on their landing page, it shows the Intel system going up to 128GB of ram with a 3090 while AMD going 64GB and a 3080. But if you go to their configuration, you can then select the option. By default, Intel gets dual channel ram while AMD gets single channel. AMD also gets slower frequency ram than Intel does.

There's tons more things in the article but it sounds like Intel and Dell are up to their old tricks again. Guess it will take a few generations of AMD winning for Dell to give AMD the same treatment.

The shortened warranties of those cards, or any other product, can't be lower than what the law of the country states so, yeah, maybe they can do that in Russia or China, but I doubt they'll try to do that on a global scale. Unless they're stupid or too greedy and want to get in troubles, of course.

The Dell thing... *sigh* Remember when I posted the article about how the sales of PC had grown a lot compared to last year? Dell was the one that grew the less. I wonder why?

High end GPU's may as well be exclusive to miners at this point, because Nvidia/AMD don't care, and neither do scalpers/miners :/

Like Quake just showed off the recent restock video, and it's pretty much all 3060's, not a single 3080 in sight...

Just to get an idea how many chips must get produced right now, here's a little look at all the fabs in the world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants

There are currently 529 fabs producing chips. Of course, none could do all the possible chips [for instance, while most fabs get upgraded to smaller processes, some fabs are still producing chips in sizes which are totally outdated by computer standards; those are used in stuff like electronics (as in, grid control), calculators (which don't exactly need the power of modern chips), IoT (which is also partly why their security is generally miserable apart from shoddy programming) and most importantly, microcontrollers in pretty much every hardware], but most that still means that tens of thousands of wafers must get produced every day in 14nm and lower for things like PCs, Smartphones, Servers or other AI hardware. And despite this meaning a 7-digit number of chips per day, it still doesn't seem to be enough.

What caused the spike in demand, however?

Are we back in 2005? Because either companies are starting to fear what Intel would do to them if they don't put their hardware into a better light or Intel is starting forcing them to. Just look what happened with the new Alienware computers:

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/321919-alienware-really-doesnt-want-you-to-buy-an-amd-ryzen-pc

Omitting information for AMD, no praise for the AMD version while praising Intel's version to no end, making it look like the AMD version is an old computer and then to top it off bottlenecking the AMD version with single-channel RAM? Yeah, that looks more like Athlon 64 vs Pentium 4 than Ryzen vs Core.

From what I gather, we were already close to the limit before Covid started. Case in point, AMD's quad-cores 3100 and 3300X, which got raving reviews for their pricetags but were seldom seen in the wild because demand strongly outstripped supply.

Then of course, Covid happened, and with it, several effects in order:

1. People got sent home to work from there, meaning both the companies' servers needed to be upgraded to handle off-site input and the employers needed to have computers to be  able to do their work from home, sending a spike in demand for server hardware and business laptops.
2. With so many people layed off and sitting at home because of the lockdowns, they needed something to do at home, so electronic entertainment in form of console or PC gaming was the perfect way to fill the gap, meaning that gaming hardware and consoles got a spike in sales, too.
3. In the US, with the covid relief bills which sent money directly to the people, big chunks went into gaming as too many people sadly didn't have many better things to do anymore.
4. AMD Renoir and Cezanne happened. Both were clear upgrades for any previous hardware and thus quickly gained lots of demand. It didn't help that OEMs didn't believe the success of Renoir would be that big due to previous Ryzen laptop hardware clearly trailing Intel, thus initial orders were way too low (especially with covid, as explained above), and by the time Cezanne happened the chip crunch already started to show it's effects, so it couldn't cover all the demand until now.

The question is, how will demand evolve after covid? Will there still be such a strong demand for business laptops or gaming consoles if people go to their office instead of sitting at home? Will the servers not get upgraded anymore for a while now that the covid-related upgrades have been done?

The big chip companies said recently that the chip crunch could continue until 2023, but I have my doubts. There are simply too many reasons for the demand to go down again after summer, and I think by end of the year the situation should start to normalize again.

Yea I posted that earlier, pretty dumb of Dell. Gonna take a few generations of AMD winning for these mainstream companies to come around.

In other news...

New Crypto Currency uses SSDs and Hard Drives to mine instead of GPUs.

"According to the latest HKEPC report, an emerging cryptocurrency, Chia, is mined with storage space and miners in China are buying up hard drives and SSDs at an alarming rate. The mining process of Chia requires a large amount of free space and runs many reading and writing operations. These miners have been purchasing massive amounts of hard drives ranging in capacity from 4TB to 18TB."

https://wccftech.com/hard-drive-and-ssd-shortages-may-occur-in-the-near-future-if-new-cryptocurrency-succeeds/



No component on PC will be safe


Intel Rocket Lake Core i9-11900K & Core i5-11600K CPUs Land on Silicon Lottery, Pre-Binned 8 Core With 5.1 GHz All-Core OC For $879 US

https://wccftech.com/intel-rocket-lake-core-i9-11900k-core-i5-11600k-cpus-silicon-lottery-pre-binned-flavors/

Imagine spending more than 5950x money on 8 core. Granted 5.1ghz all core but still...


Days Gone Director John Garvin Says Metacritic Score Is Everything to Sony

https://wccftech.com/days-gone-director-john-garvin-says-metacritic-score-is-everything-to-sony/

Personally not a fan of this direction where smaller games from Sony like Gravity Rush that can get moderate sales and score can no longer be a thing. While it wasn't a big franchise, it certainly was the game that made me purchase a Vita at launch.


Lord of the Rings MMO by Amazon has been cancelled.

https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1383499208699703304?s=20

God why are we so forsaken for this type of shit?.

First the GPU's, now the SSD's

I just want this fuckfest to end already. Next year's already looking grim. 

You know this is getting quite outta hand, that I'm surprised any gov around the world isn't taking notice of just how much power is being wasted on this pointless craze. Like a few guys have already been conducting studies and one guy has already pointed out that the combined mining collective, have are already outpacing the world's green energy output (solar panels), which to me sounds godlike fucking dire, not to mention all these GPU's end up getting wasted bad at the end of the day. 

I wouldn't be surprised if governments are making money off of cryto as well. I know at the very least, China is. And now that companies like Tesla are buying cryto and making billions off of them, governments are certainly not gonna do anything with it other than maybe legalize it further.

On the bright side, cryto did crash right now but still not as big as the one we need for things to normalize.