Why the Global Shortage in Computer Chips Matters to You

[Lichen Bark]

Due to moving around a lot, I never looked to upgrade my desktop until the tail end of the 1000 series cards. Those cards were already hard to get before the pandemic (thanks shitcoinwow miners!), add the new chip shortage, and I've thrown in the upgrade towel. My next hope is Nvidia was saying they will make their cards for the gaming market in such a way that it makes them lousy for shitcoin mining. I had great expectations for a Nvidia 3070, after the 2000 series of GPUs was just meh....kinda pricey for what they were. At this rate I will be looking at 5000 series cards...I just play the stuff my 10 year old hardware can handle now. I tell myself.....I'm not missing anything.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Intel is opening up to making contract based chips, like TSMC. That is interesting and they have their fabs in the US and EU so global chip production isn't just a nuke away from annihilation.

I assume that they're putting their older processing into production to do this, not everything has to be the latest and greatest. Upgrading and building new plants is a huge endeavor and it hasn't been a secret that Intel wants to re-use what they already have. Rumor was that the huge amount of eDRAM on their iGPUs is them putting old machinery to work.

 

[Long Tongue Silver]

I'm perfectly fine with the Ryzen 3700X and 1080 Ti I've been using.

3800X and 1070 Ti, here. Made the mistake of skipping the 20XX series, only to see supplies of 30XX cards dry up faster than octogenarian pussy.

 

[SalmaoneSlaamper]

I want a cheap quad core laptop so that I can shitpost from anywhere but they're all so much more expensive because of the shortage, I am perfectly content with the desktop that I have right now though.

 

[Elysian]

My gaming laptop broke a couple years back and my dad recently got me a dell prebuilt. I was planning on adding a 1650 and an extra stick of RAM to it to turn it into a bit of an entry level broke bitch gaming situation but now the cards are going for like 300 quid used even though their MSRP brand new is £150 and they’re like 1.5-2 GPU generations old now. I’ve been playing all my PC games from the 2000s and all my 2D indie stuff like Stardew Valley and FTL. Also a lot of PS1 emulation, I tried to emulate the PS2 games that I don’t already own IRL but without a dedicated GPU it’s a bit much for the computer to handle and the emulator keeps stuttering and crashing.

At this rate I’ll be old and grey and menopausal before I can get a cheap GPU...

 

[Dizzydent]

Its pretty ridiculous. I was curious and checked out what my current hardware is going for.

Processor i bought (in 2013) for $250 is now $500 plus tax and shipping.

And to go further, the graphics card i bought 2 years ago for $150 flat is now...

Which tax and shipping included makes it $1050 today.

It's really weird to see computers appreciate in value over time. Much less one that's over 8 years old.

I've been going around telling everyone my computer is garbage and im going to throw it in the trash all the time but when i add up everything in todays prices it comes out to like $3000 so i'm gonna hold on for now before buying anything new

 

[CrunkLord420]

I finally bought a new computer (sans new video card) a few weeks ago because Ryzen 5600X finally came into stock at my local retailer. They've haven't gone out of stock since I bought one, at least at their physical stores (they sold out of their online order stock after a week). I think the AMD shortage is mostly over.

I'm pretty happy about not having 8GB of RAM anymore.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

Video card was the one thing I didn't upgrade on my computer from the various stimulus waves - my GTX 1660 is still fine and although I've thought about going over to Radeon cards there isn't anything decent in the mid level range I shoot for.

This isn't chip related, but I was able to score a 850 watt Corsair PSU for barely more than the 650 I was originally going to get. So there are still some (non-chip) deals out there if you can look for them.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I finally bought a new computer (sans new video card) a few weeks ago because Ryzen 5600X finally came into stock at my local retailer. They've haven't gone out of stock since I bought one, at least at their physical stores (they sold out of their online order stock after a week). I think the AMD shortage is mostly over.

I'm pretty happy about not having 8GB of RAM anymore.

I checked and they're actually in stock where I live.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Power leveling: Working in a startup that needs to sell systems that include souped up gpus, not having fucking gpus to buy is pretty bad (not completely breaking since we can buy second hand/pay scalpers but it's hard enough just to sell shit).

 

[DNA_JACKED]

It's taken us months to get in spare parts at work, from batteries to displays. Getting new systems has been out of the question, we've been holding our department together with duck tape and 10 year old laptops for the last 6 months.

I quit supporting WD after the SMR crap they pulled. I've some 14TB Seagate Ironwolf Pros (backup plus hub externals), and they're great.

+1 for seagate ironwolfs. Also: protip for anyone interested in multi gigabit networking, the ironwolfs have 7200rpm models, whereas all WD NAS drives are 5200-5400 speeds. A single ironwolf can hit over 220MB/s.

My gaming laptop broke a couple years back and my dad recently got me a dell prebuilt. I was planning on adding a 1650 and an extra stick of RAM to it to turn it into a bit of an entry level broke bitch gaming situation but now the cards are going for like 300 quid used even though their MSRP brand new is £150 and they’re like 1.5-2 GPU generations old now. I’ve been playing all my PC games from the 2000s and all my 2D indie stuff like Stardew Valley and FTL. Also a lot of PS1 emulation, I tried to emulate the PS2 games that I don’t already own IRL but without a dedicated GPU it’s a bit much for the computer to handle and the emulator keeps stuttering and crashing.

At this rate I’ll be old and grey and menopausal before I can get a cheap GPU...

Even a 9700k and a vega 64 struggle with PS2 emulation. The Emotion Engine chip is notoriously difficult to emulate, and certain games still dont run properly, like anything running the snowblind engine.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Also: protip for anyone interested in multi gigabit networking, the ironwolfs have 7200rpm models, whereas all WD NAS drives are 5200-5400 speeds. A single ironwolf can hit over 220MB/s.

Ironwolfs are LOUD though. I just got rid of some and "downgraded" back to 5400RPM WDs because I couldn't even sleep with them in the same room.

 

[knobslobbin]

Chip capacity is never coming back. Globohomo hyperinflation and economic collapse will be happening right around when chip supplies should be stabilizing. Assuming we survive the elites' reaction to the crisis with a predictable final push towards communism the economic follout will be for decades. But my guess is we don't survive it. Slaves don't need billions of chips.

/glass half full kinda day

 

[Long Tongue Silver]

Its pretty ridiculous. I was curious and checked out what my current hardware is going for.

Processor i bought (in 2013) for $250 is now $500 plus tax and shipping.
View attachment 2126374
And to go further, the graphics card i bought 2 years ago for $150 flat is now...
View attachment 2126377
Which tax and shipping included makes it $1050 today.

It's really weird to see computers appreciate in value over time. Much less one that's over 8 years old.

I've been going around telling everyone my computer is garbage and im going to throw it in the trash all the time but when i add up everything in todays prices it comes out to like $3000 so i'm gonna hold on for now before buying anything new

From what I've seen before the recent chip clusterfuck, a lot of online retailers tend to jack up the prices of older processors if they're still new in packaging. My only guess is that they're fleecing enterprise customers who are either too stubborn to upgrade or have mission-critical shit and can't afford to upgrade the hardware without irreparably fucking up something.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

Yeah I agree with that it's not a good metric to look at New Old stock. The processor that I was using on the computer I just replaced costs $800 new now but that's also because it's a seven year old processor and it's somewhat scarce new in box at this point.

I don't know what the shelf life is on processors, but it seems like they stop restocking them after maybe four years or so although I'm not really sure if that's accurate that's just what it seems like to me from doing PC builds in the past.

 

[murdered meat bag]

On the plus side, there should be a pretty big drop in chip prices as new manufacturing capacity comes online at the same time in 2023 or 2024.

Another plus side: the chip shortage is causing some auto makers to go back to fitting analog gauge clusters in their vehicles. I've already sperged about how much I hate digital gauge clusters on modern cars in the "trends you hate" thread.

Any chance we get mechanical link pedals? I feel lile fly by wire has some sloppiness and lag

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Chip capacity is never coming back. Globohomo hyperinflation and economic collapse will be happening right around when chip supplies should be stabilizing. Assuming we survive the elites' reaction to the crisis with a predictable final push towards communism the economic follout will be for decades. But my guess is we don't survive it. Slaves don't need billions of chips.

/glass half full kinda day

lol it will probably take two or three years at most for SMIC to obtain (one way or another) the technology the JewSA has banned European companies from selling to them for 7nm fabs

 

[Mr. Bung]

...So I no can update my CPU right now? I has a sad...

At least my shit is state-of-the-art for 2019.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Yeah I agree with that it's not a good metric to look at New Old stock. The processor that I was using on the computer I just replaced costs $800 new now but that's also because it's a seven year old processor and it's somewhat scarce new in box at this point.

I don't know what the shelf life is on processors, but it seems like they stop restocking them after maybe four years or so although I'm not really sure if that's accurate that's just what it seems like to me from doing PC builds in the past.

I've also scratched my head looking at those prices. I suspect that after a while the item becomes more rare and at the same time old computers in use starts to break. A lot of the people buying old stock are probably the ones that really need that particular part and strongly prefer buying new instead of used. There's a lot of perfectly functional and expensive industrial machinery that runs on crappy Celerons and who knows what will happen if a slightly faster/slower Celeron is put in there.

 

[Joe Swanson]

Its pretty ridiculous. I was curious and checked out what my current hardware is going for.

Processor i bought (in 2013) for $250 is now $500 plus tax and shipping.
View attachment 2126374
And to go further, the graphics card i bought 2 years ago for $150 flat is now...
View attachment 2126377
Which tax and shipping included makes it $1050 today.

It's really weird to see computers appreciate in value over time. Much less one that's over 8 years old.

I've been going around telling everyone my computer is garbage and im going to throw it in the trash all the time but when i add up everything in todays prices it comes out to like $3000 so i'm gonna hold on for now before buying anything new

New egg has always had shitty prices for old tech, I'm sure they would charge $250 for a pentium 4 nowadays if they had the stock