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  • tipoo - Friday, December 1, 2017 - link

    Thank goodness it's waning, for the rest of us.

    Question is, can AMD put in even their 27% performance with crypto out of the picture next year?
  • StrangerGuy - Friday, December 1, 2017 - link

    Won't be pretty. If you look at the market share histogram, AMD lost more than half of their marketshare when the last cryptocrash happened. If the same trajectory happens again they will be looking at a measly ~15% overall and god knows how much they will get outsold by NV in the >$300 bracket as if they aren't already.
  • vanilla_gorilla - Friday, December 1, 2017 - link

    So when can I actually get a VEGA 56 at MSRP and not $200 over it?
  • lefty2 - Friday, December 1, 2017 - link

    Is there any solid proof that crypomining is waning?
    RX 580 and GTX 1070 prices are still way over MSRP.
  • Nate Oh - Friday, December 1, 2017 - link

    For the conclusions that JPR are making, the solid proof would be in the data and work they've done. The full data, of course, is detailed in the paid report that we don't have access to. At some point, we do have to trust JPR, historically a reliable firm, when they publicly say that cryptomining is decreasing.

    On your second point, GPU manufacturers are not drastically increasing supply in response because of the extensive lead-time of production and uncertainty of the cryptomining bubble, among other reasons. So current prices of mid-range cards are not necessarily indicators of cryptocurrency mining not softening. Here, the work done by JPR would be likely be more accurate than a current shortlist of consumer-facing e-tail prices.
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, December 2, 2017 - link

    The Anandtech article has the headline "cryptocurrency demand wanes", which is a little different from your question about evidence that "cryptomining is waning." When journalists write headlines they seem to write them as if the thing they are reporting is happening now, even if it's something that has already happened in the past. I think a better question would be "Is there any solid proof cryptomining has waned?"

    The JPR press release says "Cryptocurrency mining was not as big influence in the AIB market this quarter as it was in the lat. Nonetheless, cryptocurrency mining (especially Ethereum) is still a factor in the market, and still just as impossible to accurately measure."

    Saying it wasn't as big of an influence is not a very strong statement. They aren't saying there's a trend that they expect to continue, only that in Q3 the effect was not as strong as Q2. They didn't even quantify how much the effect waned, only that they think it did in some measurable sense. They even go on to admit that they are having trouble measuring it.

    I am going to guess that JPR are looking at historical trends of the reaction of the GPU market to other things they can measure, such as the sales of new games and the category those games fall under. I would guess that in Q2 those other numbers didn't seem to match with the sales of GPUs (many more GPUs were sold than would be expected by the historical correlation), but in Q3 the match was stronger. Also, quarter over quarter, desktop PCs ticked up in Q3 while they were down pretty strongly in Q2, and I am guessing they can be sure that gaming GPUs sold in desktop PCs are part of the gaming market.

    But yeah, it looks to me that there is a small price difference between the 1070 and the 1070 Ti. Since the 1070 Ti seems to be faster in gaming but about the same in mining Ether as the 1070, it seems that there is still an effect of cryptomining on the the market. But availability seems to be higher and the prices don't seem to be as out of line as they were in July and August, particularly with the AMD cards. If so, that supports JPR's assertion. I think cryptocurrency has been a larger percentage of sales for AMD than for NVIDIA, which explains the larger effect it's had on the price of AMD's cards.
  • yensteel - Friday, December 1, 2017 - link

    Not really waning, actually, just calm before another storm. Mining profitability heavily relies on hashrate and electricity efficiency. If electricity is completely free, then any GPU can generate profit as long as it can continue working. Therefore, people are waiting for the next GPU generation for maximum profit and are worried that they will make their current ones obsolete, hence not buying as much as of now.
  • Nate Oh - Friday, December 1, 2017 - link

    Well, waning and waxing go together, so couldn't be both 'waning' and the 'calm'? :)
  • HStewart - Friday, December 1, 2017 - link

    I personally think this Cryptomining stuff is extremely bad thing and hopefully one day eliminated from the systems just as much as we attempt Virus, Malware and such. Malwarebytes recently reported issue with a site cause issue with eating system resource related to Cryptomining

    Total GPU shipments is interesting, unless you are living in fantasy land - it points to how much the industry has turn mobile. As for discrete GPU on mobile, it probably only a small percentage of mobile cpu and will likely only take away from desktop GPU markets as the industry goes more mobile.

    I serious doubt Intel is planning to use Raju for extremely high GPU - my bet his knowledge be used in more Intel's primary market which is now Mobile systems. It is naïve to think that Intel EMIB is just for AMD Radeon GPU - with the fact that 2017 numbers show that Intel lost some of Market from NVidia not AMD - Intel will like also have a version with NVidia GPU - but in long run that will be new GPU from Raju,
  • Yojimbo - Saturday, December 2, 2017 - link

    You seem to be implying that the GPU market for high-end gaming is shrinking, but we know that isn't the case. It is enjoying healthy growth. Don't confuse the overall PC market with the gaming market. Analysts made that mistake for years but now they have learned better.

    Regarding Intel, they came out and said they wanted a high end GPU. Perhaps the main reason they want it is for data center acceleration, particularly of deep learning applications. But if they are going to build one they are going to attempt to go after whatever markets having one allows them to profitably compete in. Perhaps something else that convinced them to build a high end GPU now is this graphic, the graphic that refutes what you claim about discrete GPUs becoming irrelevant: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/12107/aib-001.pn...

    Intel probably had a strategy of swallowing up more and more of the discrete GPU business with their integrated GPUs. But that has not come to pass. Discrete GPUs are only becoming more important in the most lucrative areas of the market, and Intel has even recently had to turn to an AMD GPU to compete with NVIDIA because their integrated GPUs are not powerful enough for their customers.
  • Dragonstongue - Friday, December 1, 2017 - link

    the way analyst quacks spell out AMD as far as GPU sales go they are selling next to nothing, they do not track ALL shipments, only ones reported, seems that while AMD is not doing quite as well as Nv percentage wise, they are far from doing shitty either.

    Stupid market bulls...for all the nasty talk about AMD only losing 0.2% based on these numbers and maintaining same as year on year, I hardly call that FAIL as many allude to LOL.

    Not to mention, how many of those analysts actually know what the fk they are talking about.

    I do not see Crypto ever drying up, new makers will see that there is significant promise and new avenues that open up via Crypto, GPU are amazing tools for "hashing" and Radeon specifically have always been king of the hill when it comes to hashing prowess.

    Yes FPGA/ASIC for specific tasks are that much quicker, but for the most part, I do not see GPU ever be completely gone as a viable use of doing hashing type tasks.

    The more Nv chops things away to "upsell" their $$$$$$$$ models, the more Radeons truly shine as being the more "complete" package IMO and for my $$ spent.
  • AdditionalPylons - Wednesday, December 6, 2017 - link

    Note that JPR was referring to the waning demand of Ethereum-driven sales. As npz already mentioned the RX Vega does extremely well in for instance Monero mining. I suspect that Ethereum has popularized GPU mining and many people have found this new interest and are now looking at mining other cryptocurrencies as well.
    Many miners may also not have noted that AMD released the beta blockchain driver which improves the performance of Ethereum mining. With the regular drivers there was otherwise a drastic decrease at later epochs which was not seen in nVidia cards.
    https://www.techspot.com/article/1438-ethereum-min...
    This may have temporarily shifted potential AMD miners towards buying nVidia.

    That said, now I just hope that there could be some Vega 56's left for the third party card makers so that we could see something other than the reference designs (noisy blowers or horribly expensive liquid references). The Asus Strix Vega is only available as Vega 64 in my country at least.
  • corinthos - Wednesday, December 13, 2017 - link

    noticed last month Vega 64 PowerColor was selling for as low as $465.. In December, I see it's selling on eBay for $700+, even $800.... and I thought the whole crypto mining thing was cooling off for now...

    what's the TLDR here? keep your Vega 64 and crypto mine with it for some gains or keep it for Hackintosh (the new iMac Pros will be using the Vega)? sell it and use the dough to get a 1080ti instead (if gaming is the priority), or sell it and get an RX580 (if not a hardcore gamer and there's not a worthwhile crypto mining return with just 1 card)?

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