Nvidia seems to have its hands full thanks to crypto miners

Nvidia and AMD have been at the throats of each other for a long time, and both released their next-gen GPUs this year. but one thing which both these rivals have in common is that they both are struggling with the supply constraint issue. The demand for their cards is higher than what they can supply at the moment, hence, both companies are struggling to meet the demand for the desktop GPU market given the ongoing chip shortages.

But Nvidia seems to have received the short-end of the stick as it has to deal with the crypto miners that are snatching up whatever little card stock becomes available. And owing to all these DigiTimes sources expect Nvidia’s gaming GPU supply problem to last at least through Q3 2021.

Nvidia depends highly on Samsung’s 8nm process nodes, but it seems that the South Korean giant is yet to produce some satisfactory results with its chips. Back in Q4 2020, we were hearing rumors regarding Nvidia’s plans to tap the 7 nm nodes at TSMC for some RTX 3000 Super variants. But since TSMC is barely meeting production allocations for the 7 nm nodes, the Nvidia Super cards might get delayed to late 2020 or even 2021.

To add to troubles, the green team has to deal with the crypto miners that are focusing on buying out the already restricted RTX 3060 and RTX 3070 stocks (even the mobile versions). Since Nvidia announced its upcoming CMP HX GPU specifically designed for miners, this announcement contradicts the mining limitations imposed on the RTX 3060 cards, as it turns out that the mining throttling is only software-based and can be bypassed via custom drivers.

It simply means that Nvidia is wasting its resources on the CMP HX GPU and it makes you think that Nvidia is transforming into a crypto mining GPU maker.

According to sources, the prices for all Nvidia RTX 3000 cards will remain well above MSRP for some time and this will help Team Green to maintain a high gross margin for the next quarters. But at the same time, higher prices make it hard for buyers to purchase the GPU.

Coming to the miner, the most profitable crypto coin to mine right now via GPUs is Ethereum, but this crypto coin will soon convert its infrastructure to Proof of Stake, making GPUs useless. This could mean that prices might revert close to MSRP by Q3 2021.

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