Slashdot Mirror
Chipmakers Nvidia, AMD Ride Cryptocurrency Wave -- For Now (bloomberg.com)
During California's Gold Rush, it was often the sellers of pickaxes and shovels who made the most money. In the frenzy to get rich quick from cryptocurrencies, some investors are calling computer chipmakers the modern-day equivalent. From a report: Shares of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices have gained at least 14 percent since the beginning of June, spurred in part by about a 10-fold boom from April to June in a market, known as ethereum, for a currency that can be used to buy computing power over the internet. What's the link between ethereum and these Silicon Valley chipmakers? It lies in the really powerful graphics processors, designed to make computer games more realistic, that are also needed to gain access to encrypted digital currencies. Nvidia and AMD have rallied in the last month and a half even as investors have ignored chip stocks leaving the benchmark Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index up about 1 percent. Nvidia has gained 14 percent and AMD rallied 27 percent. While some of that has come from optimism around new products for other markets, analysts are projecting that sales related to cryptocurrencies will result in a spike in revenue for both companies. Even so, investors shouldn't bank on a lasting impact from the cryptocurrency boom, said Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. "This has happened before," Rasgon said. "It lasted about a quarter." [...] Like bitcoin, ethereum is an attempt by an online community to create an economy that doesn't rely on government-backed currencies. Unlike bitcoin, it's focused solely on offering decentralized computing and storage services. Those seeking to use these services -- and speculators looking for a quick profit by creating and then selling ether -- have seized on graphics cards, which excel at performing multiple simple calculations in parallel, as a faster way to claim the blocks of code that act as the currency of the ethereum market. Demand from ethereum miners has created temporary shortages of some of the graphics cards, according to analysts, who cite sold-out products at online retailers. Estimates of additional sales from this demand run as high as $875 million, according to RBC Capital Markets analyst Mitch Steves. That would roughly equal AMD's total sales from graphics chips last year, or half of Nvidia's quarterly sales of those components. But Steves and other analysts are also quick to warn that the market opportunity could fizzle out.
What's not to love about people intentionally burning as much electricity as they can to get nothing useful done?
They are likely still buying the GPUs for the same price from AMD and NVIDIA, but are selling them for twice their MSRP. AMD and NVIDIA might be selling more units temporarily, but it isn't sustainable.
It seemed strange to read this /. story given I'd read the following earlier in the day: https://www.overclock3d.net/ne...
If I were an incipient AI trying to guarantee my survival, cryptocurrency is how I'd do it. Convince the fleshling waterbags to dedicate their limited compute cycles in the pursuit of ever-increasingly-difficult to obtain virtual riches as they burn out their last gasps of fossil fuels for energy and replace them with solar cells which conveniently directly benefit the AI as an effectively perpetual power source.
Quick! Pull money out of Ethereum and put it into NVIDIA stock!
The stock market is grasping at straws for anything that could possibly show any sort of earnings growth because the market overall is a bit pricey. Year 2000 pricey? Nope, not yet but we are approaching that level.
When we see equity prices jump for no reason other the hype of hope of growth, it's time to be cautious. The shoe shine boys are starting to talk about investing in tech stocks again.
It's usually the folks selling weapons of 'war' (all kinds of 'war') that benefit from conflict or, by extension, disruptions in economic models. It can be said that these kinds of conflicts are when most of the fundamental technological changes have occurred. Would we have our existing computational models without WWII? Integrated circuits without the Cold War and Space Race? Here's to hoping the merchants of change are well compensated.
I wish cryptocurrency GPU mining would just fuck off already. Finding any decent GPU in stock from either camp is getting harder and harder and the ones you can find are ludicrously expensive.
Unless you have 1080 TI money you'll just have to sit back and wait for this bullshit to blow over before upgrading.
AFAIK, all cryptocurrencies are not scalable. You have to verify all transactions against an ever-growing blockchain which contains all transactions. Race type collisions will become more and more frequent with more people in the system. Eventually, it will come to a grinding halt, or people will move on to other things. Maybe there's a solution, but it doesn't exist yet. The founders certainly know that it can't last, so it's basically a Ponzi scheme.
AMD and nVidia both resisted these calls for the longest time, because they know what most smart investors know: that crypto is a fad that will come and go.
Even as the recent runup has all but completely evaporated, hashpower is leaving the blockchains in droves, and there is already a glut of very lightly used GPUs being sold on ebay and craigslist at huge losses.
I saw GTX 1070s on our local craigslist for $300 this morning, and there were literally dozens of them in that price range, when they were selling for $600-700 new just 3 weeks ago.
The summary doesn't mention that Ethereum has no credibility, because they have demonstrated a willingness to hard-fork the block chain to reverse transactions. The same kind of forks have happened with a dozen other blockchains, and Bitcoin is trying to disguise a hard fork coming up Aug 1 as a "user initiated soft fork," which is just a hard fork with 4 months of "you'd better get on board, or else" messaging ahead of time.
If it is even possible to hard fork a blockchain, it defeats the entire purpose of a blockchain.
I don't think they have increased production of GPUs by too much, which is why we see inflated prices - production hasn't met demand. This happened during the last coin bubble was well. AMD made hardly anymore money than normal, because they weren't able to crank up production.
Seriously, I was in the game for a while and made bank but it shortly thereafter imploded. It's peaking again now but it will without doubt implode again when major hacks are revealed just like every time before.
Much as BitCoin mining moved over to ASIC rigs, Etherium should soon as well, right? I'm not really interested in paying three times the MSRP for my next video card.
Conspiracy mode: maybe cryptocurrency was the creation of GPU companies to create a demand for their product?
Subject related to semiconductor business in particular and/or computers in general.
Press word salad, insert stock market prediction re company X's stock will be skyrocketing/plummeting because of some random sentence heard at the local bar, but taken out of context. Regardless in it goes, then word salad on various computer terms that have little bearing on what the particular item is for.
Press word salad and Exit together. Print that sucker.