Friday night topic: What have you learned lately?
Tonight's topic comes courtesy of our suggestions thread, specifically an idea suggested by TR reader BIF. Here it is:
What interesting personal research project have you engaged ...
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Deal of the week: Solid-state storage and games
This week in our deal post, we've gathered a couple of juicy solid-state storage deals—and a handful of gaming bargains for good measure. Let's start with the hardware:
Now, what ...
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How about a Radeon R9 290X for 900 bucks?
If you've been following these things at all, you probably know that the Radeon R9 290X and its little brother, the R9 290, have been selling at steep premiums
for a while now. The 290X's suggested list price is $549, and the 290's
is $399. Although both cards have been relatively easy to find in stock
at online retailers, they've been going for something like $200 above
list.
The problem is one of supply and demand, of course. Resellers are raising prices in the face of scarcity.
One trend has created a major distortion in the market on the supply side: crypto-coin miners have evidently been snapping up high-end Radeons like mad in order to build mining farms. Today's Radeons happen to be unusually good at crunching the make-work algorithms used by coins like Litecoin, and that makes them essentially money-printing machines. As long as the power consumption and other costs work out right, it's possible to reap a calculated profit by mining coins with these cards. That profit can be converted from virtual coins into very real money, and as you might imagine, that's made these Radeons hot commodities.
In
fact, they're such hot commodities that R9 290X prices have hit a new
high-water mark at Newegg, as indicated in the screenshot above.
Multiple versions of the R9 290X are in stock, but they're now priced at a penny shy of 900 bucks.
There are a couple of cards priced slightly lower, including an MSI at
$849.99, but that's it. The marginally slower R9 290 is selling for between $650 and $750. Even the R9 280X, which is almost identical to the two-plus-year-old Radeon HD 7970 and is supposed to sell for $300, is going for $550-580 right now.
That's... just a bit above list.
The e-tailer has placed limits of three to six cards per customer on most of these products, which at least suggests that bulk purchases of 290 and 290X cards may have been depleting stocks.
The demand for Radeon R9 cards is definitely healthy, but the unfortunate part of this situation is that gamers have been effectively priced out of the market for high-end Radeons. If you're looking for this class of graphics card, the GeForce GTX 780 is a much better deal. It's selling at around its $500 suggested price. But fans of AMD and gamers who, for whatever reason, would tend to prefer AMD's latest offerings are faced with an unhappy choice.
In situations like this one where graphics card prices are being buffeted by the forces of supply and demand, we often have trouble discerning how much of the blame to assign to strong demand and how much to chalk up to poor supply. Several years ago, scant supply of 40-nm GPUs from TSMC made both AMD and Nvidia GPUs scarce. At other times, one of the GPU makers has simply missed on its estimates of demand for its latest products, leading to poor availability and a shift in market share to the other team. Supply-side problems do happen. However, the GPU makers are very reluctant to share hard numbers about the quantities of chips they are shipping, both for competitive reasons and because of SEC regulations against that sort of disclosure in the wrong forum.
That's probably why our inquiries to AMD about the current situation have been met with not particularly enlightening answers, like "supply is healthy, but demand is very strong." Who knows what that statement means without context? With that said, we do have some sources familiar with the situation, and they've indicated that the monthly quantity of new Hawaii GPUs coming into the market is relatively solid, if not spectacular, for this class of graphics chip.
If true, then the lion's share of the blame for the hefty mark-ups on high-end Radeons falls on the demand side of the equation.
Of course, AMD has the option of ordering much larger volumes of Hawaii chips, if it can secure the additional wafers from TSMC. Those chips likely wouldn't reach the market for several months at least, but AMD could pull the trigger at any time on an unusually large production run.
The trouble with doing so is that pretty much everyone observing the crypto-mining phenomenon expects the bubble to burst at some point. If and when it does, those coin miners who have assembled large farms will undoubtedly be looking to sell their graphics cards. AMD could be left holding big inventories of GPUs while a glut of slightly used high-end Radeons floods the secondary market via eBay and the like. That could be a financially damaging outcome, especially for a company in the midst of attempting a dramatic turnaround.
I'm sure AMD is enjoying its sales success, but my sense is that it recognizes the risk involved in its current position and will probably be fairly cautious when making forecasts and placing orders for GPUs. The firm seems to recognize that gamers, not coin miners, are its core customers.
The question is: what can it do to appease those core customers, when they have effectively been priced out of the market? Here's hoping the folks at AMD have some creative options in the works, because the present situation isn't great for gamers.
Read more...The problem is one of supply and demand, of course. Resellers are raising prices in the face of scarcity.
One trend has created a major distortion in the market on the supply side: crypto-coin miners have evidently been snapping up high-end Radeons like mad in order to build mining farms. Today's Radeons happen to be unusually good at crunching the make-work algorithms used by coins like Litecoin, and that makes them essentially money-printing machines. As long as the power consumption and other costs work out right, it's possible to reap a calculated profit by mining coins with these cards. That profit can be converted from virtual coins into very real money, and as you might imagine, that's made these Radeons hot commodities.
That's... just a bit above list.
The e-tailer has placed limits of three to six cards per customer on most of these products, which at least suggests that bulk purchases of 290 and 290X cards may have been depleting stocks.
The demand for Radeon R9 cards is definitely healthy, but the unfortunate part of this situation is that gamers have been effectively priced out of the market for high-end Radeons. If you're looking for this class of graphics card, the GeForce GTX 780 is a much better deal. It's selling at around its $500 suggested price. But fans of AMD and gamers who, for whatever reason, would tend to prefer AMD's latest offerings are faced with an unhappy choice.
In situations like this one where graphics card prices are being buffeted by the forces of supply and demand, we often have trouble discerning how much of the blame to assign to strong demand and how much to chalk up to poor supply. Several years ago, scant supply of 40-nm GPUs from TSMC made both AMD and Nvidia GPUs scarce. At other times, one of the GPU makers has simply missed on its estimates of demand for its latest products, leading to poor availability and a shift in market share to the other team. Supply-side problems do happen. However, the GPU makers are very reluctant to share hard numbers about the quantities of chips they are shipping, both for competitive reasons and because of SEC regulations against that sort of disclosure in the wrong forum.
That's probably why our inquiries to AMD about the current situation have been met with not particularly enlightening answers, like "supply is healthy, but demand is very strong." Who knows what that statement means without context? With that said, we do have some sources familiar with the situation, and they've indicated that the monthly quantity of new Hawaii GPUs coming into the market is relatively solid, if not spectacular, for this class of graphics chip.
If true, then the lion's share of the blame for the hefty mark-ups on high-end Radeons falls on the demand side of the equation.
Of course, AMD has the option of ordering much larger volumes of Hawaii chips, if it can secure the additional wafers from TSMC. Those chips likely wouldn't reach the market for several months at least, but AMD could pull the trigger at any time on an unusually large production run.
The trouble with doing so is that pretty much everyone observing the crypto-mining phenomenon expects the bubble to burst at some point. If and when it does, those coin miners who have assembled large farms will undoubtedly be looking to sell their graphics cards. AMD could be left holding big inventories of GPUs while a glut of slightly used high-end Radeons floods the secondary market via eBay and the like. That could be a financially damaging outcome, especially for a company in the midst of attempting a dramatic turnaround.
I'm sure AMD is enjoying its sales success, but my sense is that it recognizes the risk involved in its current position and will probably be fairly cautious when making forecasts and placing orders for GPUs. The firm seems to recognize that gamers, not coin miners, are its core customers.
The question is: what can it do to appease those core customers, when they have effectively been priced out of the market? Here's hoping the folks at AMD have some creative options in the works, because the present situation isn't great for gamers.
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Rumor: Haswell Refresh platform to arrive in April
Well, lookie there. DigiTimes is back with more Intel CPU rumors. After predicting the delayed debut of Intel's Broadwell processors yesterday, the Taiwanese site now reports that Intel's Haswell Refresh processors will be out in April, a month early.
Last we heard, Haswell Refresh was supposed to introduce new, higher-clocked Haswell-based processors as well as a 9-series chipset family. Word has it the 9-series Haswell Refresh motherboard might be upgradeable ...
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Valentine's Day Shortbread
Eight is Enough
- EETimes: PC sales rise, miss expectations
- DigiTimes: Samsung ramping up 25nm production for DRAM
- Tecmint: What if Linus Torvalds would have accepted job proposal of Steve Jobs?
- Ars Technica: New Intel NUC BIOS update fixes SteamOS, other Linux booting problems
- The Verge: Apple is reportedly planning a new
set-top-box with content from Time Warner Cable
- Android Police: LG announces the G Pro 2 before MWC
- Google: VMware to bring traditional Windows apps and desktops to Chromebooks
- Neowin: Windows 8.1 Update 1 build 17019 screenshot leaks, enters escrow
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200 million Win8 licenses sold; adoption still lags behind Win7
Microsoft
hasn't exactly been forthcoming with Windows 8 sales figures in recent
months. During a conference call yesterday, however, Microsoft marketing
chief Tami Reller revealed that Windows 8 has now sold 200 million
licenses. Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley was listening in, and she later received confirmation of the figure in a written statement from the company:Hitting this milestone 15 months after Windows 8's release doesn't quite warrant celebration. Foley points out that Windows 7 had already ...
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A quick look at Mantle on AMD's Kaveri APU
It was on the morning of Monday, November 11 that AMD showed Battlefield 4 running on its Kaveri APU for the first time. The chip was just over two months from release, and AMD promised that its integrated graphics would deliver playable performance in the new shooter. In addition, the company told of future performance improvements that Mantle, its close-to-the-metal graphics programming interface, would bring to Kaveri in BF4.
Now, three months hence, Kaveri is here. After multiple delays and setbacks, so ...
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Rumor: Intel's Broadwell processors now delayed until late 2014
Could Broadwell be in for another delay?
Last October, Intel announced that a "defect density" problem had pushed back the production of 14-nm Broadwell processors ...
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Former Steam director leaves Microsoft in under six months
You know Microsoft's ninth annual pledge to restore its focus on PC gaming? Well, apparently the folks in Redmond will have to disappoint us without the help of Jason Holtman, the former Steam director the firm hired less than six months ago.
The folks at Neowin first noticed that Holman's LinkedIn page indicates he left Microsoft ...
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Comcast to acquire Time Warner Cable, create new axis of evil
Two of the largest cable TV and Internet service providers are set to merge. Comcast has agreed to buy Time Warner Cable
in a deal worth $45.2 billion, according to reports everywhere. Charter
Communications had been pursuing a purchase of Time Warner Cable but
evidently lost out to Comcast's higher bid.If the merger meets regulatory approval, which is no sure thing, the combined company would own "almost three-quarters of the cable industry," ...
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The Radeon R7 265 makes its debut
A couple of days after the announcement of the Radeon R7 250X, AMD continues to revamp the lower ranks of its GPU lineup with today's introduction of the Radeon R7 265. Like the 250X, the R7 265 isn't based on new silicon; it's simply the rebranding and repositioning of an existing product.
In this case, the R7 265 has roots in the Radeon HD 7850, which first debuted just under two years ago at ...
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Available Tags:Radeon , APU , Steam , Microsoft ,
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