Back in January, Collette Kress, Chief Financial Officer of Nvidia, said that ‘we foresee total channel inventories…probably stay lean during Q1.’ Now the quarters Nvidia is calculating somewhat separately from each other, yeah, but at the end of April, the green team calendar ends with Q1. The second quarter of Nvidia then takes place between May and July.
The timeline can be very complicated, but Nvidia planned it to be smoother by May and June, and July. But this may have been a naive reading of her comment, as Digitimes now indicates that Q2 looks as though it is going to be a fight and that you would be very disappointed if you had the expectation that things will improve in summer.
That said, if you’re after a new AMD Radeon graphics card, Nvidia is a more viable choice, even though they are restricted. You really need to be really dedicated and maybe do the extra work on bricks-and-mortar stores instead of just prowling online.
And why is the inventory of Nvidia so limited? Many factors like The supply chain restriction of Covid-19 still stands to mean that individual parts, ranging from condensers to the memory, are more or less onerous to track, demand for GPUs has been growing tremendously, and demand for computation capacity, fuelled largely by another rise in cryptocurrency prices, has recently risen enormously.
“Our overall capacity has not been able to keep up with that overall strong demand that we have seen,” Kress said in January. “We’ve seen in terms of constraints, constraints really from the overall global surge of compute and the overall capacity, a capacity that may be necessary for assembly and test and/or sub-trades as well. But again, we remain focused on this and working each day to improve our overall supply situation.”
However, Digitimes also suggests that the 8nm production yields of Samsung for Nvidia’s Ampere GPUs are a fight too, as the Korean producer finds it difficult to get good numbers of chips on each wafer. But anyone should prove the truthfulness of those rumors, and I have the impression that there might be conscious or unconscious preconceptions in the Taiwanese publication since Samsung’s gunnings for the TSMC manufacturing semiconductor crown. Talking about TSMC would take us to the best news. Or the positive news theoretically. Or the chance for positive news at the very least. Look, here in a PC hardware room we hang on a line, we need some nice news and then we’ll get it to where we can.
Digitimes reports that the factories are gaining some extra supply for the year thanks to the release by Apple of some of the strangleholds on the TSMC 5 and 7 nm production capacities. Sweclockers says that AMD and Nvidia are among these manufacturers and that while AMD will concentrate on its most significant goodies – Zen 3 EPYC server chips – Nvidia could potentially have RTX 30-series TSMC cards instead of Samsung.
That is a little hopeful, but Nvidia has booked decent capacity in the TSMC for some lower-end silicone of the RTX 30 series — hopefully the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti is still manufacturing for Samsung too so that people can really purchase a graphics card in quantities.
This also means nothing positive for someone who wishes to use AMD’s fine-ass graphics cards because, at a moment, the AMD is faced with its CPU preferences first.
