| they're setting prices high (and delaying the launch of the mainstream and lower-tier cards) because they have huge stockpiles of Ampere chips they need to burn through. Launch the stuff at the top to get the sales from the whales (VR, enthusiast gaming, etc) who are willing to pay for performance and delay the lower cards that would compete with your ampere inventory. It's the Turing strategy all over again - when you have a stockpile of older cards, you don't make your new cards too attractive. And yes, they also have a big TSMC allocation too - but they gotta get rid of the Ampere stuff first, the longer it sits the more it will have to be marked down, launching new cards that obsolete the inventory they're trying to sell would just make things worse. AMD is going to be doing the same thing - they pushed back the midrange Navi 33 and will be launching only the high-end Navi 31 until that miner inventory burns through a bit. Similarly to NVIDIA, that likely implies they'll be launching at a high price, they'll undercut NVIDIA by $100 or $200 or something and take the margins but they're not gonna be the heroes of the $700 market either. --- The EVGA thing is a tempest in a teapot though, the losses he's talking about are something that's happened in the last month (he supposedly decided to quit back at the start of the year) and not representative of the (large, 10x normal) margins that board partners have been making in recent years. I personally didn't see much evidence of "price caps" with partner's first-party storefronts selling 3080s at 2.50-3x FE MSRP either. And yes, jensen is an asshole and being a partner is a low-margin business, everyone already knows that. EVGA is losing money because of some of it's CEO's ridiculous prestige side-projects (custom motherboards, enthusiast monitors, video capture cards that turned out to be falsely advertised, pcie sound cards, etc) and generous warranty support (long and transferable with absurdly cheap extended warranties) coupled with a higher-than-average failure rate (because they contract out assembly) and a generally lower-than-industry margin (because they contract out assembly) and they're just being drama queens on the way out. Someone else with a personal axe to grind (EVGA tried to blacklist him for a critical review), but relaying some commentary from the other board partners: https://www.igorslab.de/en/evga-pulls-the-plug-with-loud-ban... |