“Availability of Nvidia chips dropped during the first quarter”

The graphics card year 2021 has already been unofficially written off as an annus horribilis by the industry magazine Digitimes. Nvidia itself has only talked about “component shortages”, while Digitimes in particular pointed to problems with the company’s manufacturing partner Samsung as the source of the problem. The industry magazine is now supported by one of Nvidia’s largest partner manufacturers, Asus.

According to Tom’s Hardware, during an investor conference, Asus pointed out a substandard supply of circuits from Nvidia as the company’s graphics division’s biggest problem. Asus does not just mean that bad yield, the number of working circuits per manufactured silicon wafer, is probably unsatisfactory – but also that Nvidia has reduced the number of circuits ordered from Samsung to the first quarter of the year.

Reduced order intake at contract manufacturers during the first quarter of the year is in itself completely normal, as demand normally declines after Christmas shopping. What has not been included in Nvidia’s calculations is instead the pandemic economy and a boom in cryptocurrencies that have boosted demand even more. Regarding the proportion of Asus graphics cards that end up with crypto-breakers in particular, the company says it cannot predict.

During the final quarter of 2020, Nvidia delivered 9.1 million graphics chips and a record result. The number of circuits delivered was approximately one million more than in the last quarter of 2019, and the company itself claimed that cryptocurrency mining “likely” played a part in the company’s financial success. Exactly what the company is doing to improve the supply is unclear – but previous reports have talked about the manufacture of “Ampere” circuits at TSMC alongside Samsung.

As a result of the cryptocurrency boom, however, Nvidia has presented its tailor-made series of calculation cards for just breaking the cryptocurrency called CMP. The majority of the cards in the CMP series are based on older Turing circuits manufactured at 12 nanometers at TSMC in particular – which is why rumors of “Ampere” production at the contract manufacturer can be greatly exaggerated.

Whether the availability of graphics cards in the RTX 3000 series will be easier, we will see at the earliest in the summer – before that, Nvidia plans to launch at least two new models in the form of RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti.

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