With Bitcoin (BTC) falling below $20,000 and Ethereum (ETH) falling below $1,000, the mining boom that lasted more than two years has finally come to an end.
Photo source: Virtual currency website screenshot
Miners need computing power to mine virtual currencies, and graphics cards are the best choice. To cater to this market, NVIDIA developed a series of CMP cards without video output.
In the face of the sluggish virtual currency market, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang admitted in last week’s earnings call that he is not optimistic about the future of GPU chips in the blockchain sector, and the business will not become a major source of revenue for NVIDIA. In his words, Huang Renxun obviously showed that he had the intention of giving up CMP mine card.
A farce has ended, leaving the video card market in ruins and a large group of consumers who have suffered. Even if the mining boom does not come back in the future, we will not forget that NVIDIA once caused pain to the average consumer.
Someone gets rich and someone else gets roofed. The consumer is the perfect victim
The main target group for consumer graphics cards is PC users. It is normal for prices to change due to the influence of supply and demand, but during the mining boom, the price increase of graphics cards is too large.
Shortly after the release of the RTX 30 series, the mining boom erupted, and graphics card prices skyrocketed. The original price of the public version of the RTX 3060 Ti has been increased to 8,000 ~ 9,000 dollars, but it is a high-end graphics card, because the original price is expensive, the price increase is smaller.
Faced with this, NVIDIA made two big choices,
First, the release of CMP series mining cards; Second, the launch of RTX 30 series lock computing power graphics card.
Compared with ordinary consumers, the advantage of mine bosses is that they have more money and less work and place orders quickly. In front of the huge market, NVIDIA naturally refused to give up, so the CMP series mining card was born.
Some people may think that mining cards do not have much to do with ordinary consumers, but in fact, mining cards need to occupy the foundry and production line capacity that used to belong to ordinary graphics cards. During the mining tide chip production capacity is insufficient, many car companies were forced to reduce the distribution of delivery, the future replacement, RTX 30 series production capacity decline, is bound to lead to graphics card due to demand again rise.
Photo: Screenshot from JD.com
At the peak of the mining boom, mine owners need professional mining cards to dig holes, but when the boom is over, or even worse than the peak, problems arise. Mining requires a lot of power, so the graphics card will basically choose Ethereum, mining Bitcoin is purely money-losing. But when mining Ethereum became unprofitable,
Ordinary graphics cards can also be used to sell back blood, professional mining cards have no video output function, unless you find other mine owners to take over, otherwise there is no way to sell.
Not to mention for mine owners, the more graphics cards, the better, all in order to mine money. Therefore, the emergence of CMP mining card does not reduce the difficulty of consumers to buy video cards.
Lock their own calculation force, why to crack the scheme?
NVIDIA reported Q3 FY2023 (actually 2022) revenue from Oems and Other (where most of the revenue comes from mining cards) was just $73 million in the quarter, down 69% year-over-year and 48% sequentially.
The decline in specialty card sales, which began in early 2022, has caused NVIDIA’s market value to fall since March. Today NVIDIA is worth just over $380 billion, less than 50% of what it was at its peak. In order to save the virtual currency industry and graphics card business revenue, NVIDIA made a bold decision – the official release of the lock computing force cracking driver.
Photo source: screenshot of Google stock market
In an effort to placate consumers around the world who complained after the mining boom, and also to give in to CMP mining cards, NVIDIA introduced a locked power graphics card. The graphics card mines Ethereum with half the computing power of gaming, in order to set aside some graphics cards for the average consumer.
However, seeing the ailing virtual currency industry, NVIDIA has no shame, officially released a crack computing power drive. In fact, as early as the official release of crack driver, there were two online RTX 30 series lock force cracked news, one of the rumors for NVIDIA official crack, but has not been confirmed.
Fortunately, NVIDIA’s move didn’t bring the virtual currency industry to life, and Ethereum has hit an inflection point. On September 15 this year, the main currency of graphics card mining Ethereum closed the mining pool, other currencies difficult climate, a time of mining almost equal to loss of money.
As a result, virtual currencies have collapsed, millions of mining cards have gone into the second-hand market, and even primary graphics cards may be refurbished mining cards. Therefore, consumers naturally do not want to buy mining cards, are waiting for RTX 40 series, especially 60, 70 and other dessert cards. But once again, NVIDIA and AMD let us down.
In order to clear the warehouse, Huang was even willing to fall out with old classmates
During the mining boom, NVIDIA produced so many graphics cards that the boom ended and so many cards disrupted the market. To clear inventory, NVIDIA released the RTX 40 series with only the 80 and 90 high-end graphics cards and none of the 60 and 70 dessert cards, in order to force consumers to buy the RTX 30 series.
At the same time, there are rumors on the Internet that NVIDIA is not allowing dealerships to reduce the price of its RTX 30 series graphics cards in order to quickly sell them. True or false, but a company’s actions, but it shows that the rumor is more credible. The company, called EVGA, was founded in 1999 by Andrew Han, a rumored classmate of NVIDIACEO Huang.
Photo credit: pixabay
EVGA and NVIDIA have been together for more than two decades, through thick and thin, and now they’re falling out. In a sign of how prickly his relationship with Huang has become, Han said NVIDIA would no longer be in the graphics industry unless it replaced its CEO.
At the moment, NVIDIA is still in inventory clearance. The RTX 4060/70 is expected to be released as soon as March next year.
Consumers can either buy the RTX 3060/70 series cards at prices that are still higher than the public version’s initial price, or they can buy unguaranteed quality cards on the second-hand market at low prices.
It can be said that NVIDIA and AMD have made a lot of money in this mining boom, and many early miners and currency speculators have also made a lot of money. Of course, there may also be some losses, even bankruptcy, these people or enterprises are mostly late entry, missed the best opportunity.
Especially speculators, Bitcoin from the peak of close to $60,000, all the way down to around $16,000, I don’t know how many people lost their money, forced to “see the roof”.
Only ordinary consumers, in this mining boom, are the victims from beginning to end.
How long can NVIDIA’s monopoly last?
Dare to embarrass all the dealerships, NVIDIA’s confidence comes from the graphics card industry’s position. For a long time, there were only two leading brands of consumer graphics cards, one is NVIDIA, but AMD.
AMD, beating NVIDIA is just a fantasy?
It has to be said that after Su Zifeng came to power, AMD changed a lot. CPU performance and power consumption performance caught up with Intel, and the graphics card business also grew stronger. RTX 6000 series became the favorite of mine bosses for its low power consumption, low price and high performance. However, in the consumer market, AMD graphics cards still have a number of problems, such as driving, actual performance is not as good as the theoretical performance.
Photo: Screenshot from JD.com
Xiao Lei used the graphics card for RX 6600 XT, RTX 3060 Ti, the latter Xiao Lei also used for a while, can only say the difference is very obvious. Therefore, in the competition with NVIDIA, AMD can only rely on the cost performance to contend with it, the hard power is obviously inferior.
Plus, AMD, knowing it was losing, put a lot of effort into other businesses, such as console chips, which make up Microsoft’s Xbox and SONY’s PlayStation consoles, and NVIDIA has a near-monopoly on graphics.
Fortunately, with more and more companies eyeing the graphics card market, NVIDIA’s monopoly won’t last much longer.
Not only AMD, NVIDIA has more competitors
During the epidemic, to see the hot graphics card industry, Intel returned to the unique display market after twenty years, “sharp” unique display was born. Intel has not been in the dominant industry for many years, but it has a strong reputation. Sharp Torch core display is integrated in the CPU low power graphics card, performance is not strong, but the energy consumption ratio is very high, and after years of development, has GTX 750Ti level.
Intel has a number of dazzling unique market, after testing, the A770 has reached the RTX 3060 game level. While it’s still not up to NVIDIA and there are some hiccups, it’s important to note that consumers don’t care about the performance of high-end graphics cards, as long as they’re cheap and don’t have problems playing games.
Image source: Intel
In that light, Intel’s dazzling A770 is a success.
In the future, Intel only needs to improve product drivers and positioning, and set reasonable prices. With Intel’s influence and brand value, there is no need to worry about sales as long as the product quality does not drag down.
In addition, the domestic consumer heart of the domestic graphics card, also emerged. Some time ago, Moore Thread released the MTT S80 domestic graphics card, the initial price of 2999 dollars, RTX 3060 Ti standard. To be fair, there are fewer games, and the gaming experience may not be as good as NVIDIA’s graphics cards of a few years ago, but the MTT S80 isn’t far behind when it comes to work, given the computing infrastructure.
AMD also wants, Intel, Moore thread is good, the graphics card is still not as good as NVIDIA at this stage, but in view of the development of the industry, these enterprises may not not catch up with or even exceed the possibility of NVIDIA in the future.
Consumers swear and buy, but NVIDIA needs to watch out
The consumer vote is the most fair, because it costs them money to vote. Although NVIDIA has had a bad reputation since the mining boom, consumers have been scolding and buying. The RX 6700 is much lower than the RTX 3070, as can be seen from the guarantee rate of the second-hand market.
Photo source: Screenshot of Xianyu
Graphics card performance, the future for a long time, AMD, Intel, Moore thread can not catch up with NVIDIA. Therefore, from the standpoint of consumers, the temporary purchase of graphics cards is still NVIDIA products. But the loss of word of mouth will still have a huge impact on NVIDIA, and may even affect investor confidence.
You can see this in what has happened to NVIDIA’s market cap, which is now less than half of what it was at its peak. Add to that the fact that the virtual currency and graphics card industries aren’t what they used to be, and NVIDIA’s revenues and profits are falling, and Huang needs to reassure investors.
NVIDIA has two paths ahead of it.
First, release some cost-effective products to bring back the reputation; Second, expand into other businesses to increase revenues and profits.
Since NVIDIA didn’t release the RTX 4060/70, they probably didn’t want to go down the first route, so there’s only the second route.
In recent years, NVIDIA has made a number of moves, one of the more robust growth is ARM servers and in-car chips. Most traditional servers use X86 architecture, but ARM architecture is suitable for servers because of its low power consumption, compatibility, and strong customization. TrendForce reports that the ARM server industry will reach 22% penetration in 205, which is a very dramatic increase.
In the on-board chip industry, NVIDIA’s Thor computing power is up to 2000TFLOPS, which is the highest on-board chip in computing power.
But NVIDIA is a new entrant in both ARM servers and in-car chips, and it’s not going to be easy to break through. On the contrary, it is easier to succeed in the long-established graphics card industry, and it is better to recover the lost reputation of the graphics card business than to throw money into other industries.
Cover photo Source: Screenshot of Jingdong
