In Germany, NVIDIA quotes 519 € as the starting price for the RTX 3070 series. Unfortunately, the cards are sold out almost everywhere and the few sites that accept back-orders list them for almost 1.000 € now, which is crazy. So Kudos to them for doing this, as the crypto craze seems to heat up there's no end in sight for miners buying up GPUs and NVIDIA risks angering a lot of regular people that weren't able to buy a new graphics card for almost 6 months now.
That said I'm not sure how effective this measure will be as in my understanding all that miners need to do in order to circumvent this throttling is avoid downloading the newest NVIDIA drivers (?). In addition, I'm sure miners will quickly come up with a crack that renders the throttling moot, so not sure if this will fix the supply side. Offering specific hardware to miners that doesn't compete with that for gamers seems to be a better solution, but again if NVIDIA isn't able to satisfy the demand for such hardware miners will keep buying regular GPUs and try to circumvent the software throttling.
I'd rather they have scaled up the demand. They've had years of this to take the higher profits and invest them. Even if people don't use them for mining, the demand for Machine Learning is there - instead GeForce cards have been banned for use in data centers for years. Not to mention that the crippling of 3060 would be trivial for mining operations to get around.
There are car factories shutting down due to lack of chips. The silicon for the systems that I work on has its lead times increased from the customary <30 to 50 weeks. The supply issues is worldwide, for all fabless semiconductor issues.
How do you suggest they scale up demand short of building their own fabs? (Which I hope you aren't suggesting...)
Building more fabs is the only sustainable solution. Demand is higher than supply, and miners will just use older drivers or figure out a workaround pretty quickly, unless the new mining cards are substantially cheaper yet just as fast as the "gaming" GPUs.
Building more fabs is the general solution to the demand in silicon. And that's happening.
But in the context of "I'd rather they have scaled up the demand", where "they' is Nvidia (or almost any other fabless semiconductor company), it's not a solution because it's impossible for them to build fabs or to foresee and plan for the supply chain disruption that was caused by COVID-19.
>it's impossible for them to build fabs or to foresee and plan for the supply chain disruption that was caused by COVID-19.
This has been happening for half a decade, it is not remotely a COVID issue. And no, they can't build their own fabs but they can certainly invest (either directly or indirectly by securing larger orders at a higher price even more years in advance) all the premium so there's at more fabs at an earlier time.
That said I'm not sure how effective this measure will be as in my understanding all that miners need to do in order to circumvent this throttling is avoid downloading the newest NVIDIA drivers (?). In addition, I'm sure miners will quickly come up with a crack that renders the throttling moot, so not sure if this will fix the supply side. Offering specific hardware to miners that doesn't compete with that for gamers seems to be a better solution, but again if NVIDIA isn't able to satisfy the demand for such hardware miners will keep buying regular GPUs and try to circumvent the software throttling.