Graphics card prices "avalanche", Apple M1 does not talk about martial arts, and so the party is the biggest winner?

"Wait for the party" ushered in a proud spring. Since the second half of 2020, the price of high-end graphics cards has been rising all the way, with three times the price, and it once exceeded 20,000 yuan in the spring of 2021. Since February this year, the prices of high-end graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD have both dropped by more than 10%.

In late March, the price of the high-end graphics card GeForce RTX 3080 TUF Gaming OC dropped by 35% in one day in the Australian market, and the quotation dropped from AUD 2,299 (about RMB 10,000) to AUD 1,499 (about RMB 7,000), the largest in history. decline. During the same period, the RTX 3080 Ti in JD.com had a "break" situation - the lowest price was 8,399 yuan, while the official price of NVIDIA was 8,899 yuan.

"If you don't buy it, I don't buy it, and it will drop by 200 tomorrow." After waiting for the party to wait and see for two years, now the goal is to buy the RTX 40 series that will be sold at the original price; and the "downhill party" who bought at a high price can't help but feel a little disheartened. In fact, most of the waiting party and the "downhill party" are PC gamers. They want to run a 3A masterpiece like "Cyberpunk 2077", but they are not just needed.

Just because the price of graphics cards is as exciting as a roller coaster ride, waiters and buyers have an "investment"-like expectation. The key point is that the reason for the fluctuation of graphics card prices is not just as simple as "mining".

Prices at home and abroad plunged, the originator of Bitcoin

According to data on the US e-commerce platform NewEgg, the prices of Nvidia and AMD have been falling year after year. The NVIDIA 30 series currently has an overall premium of 72%, with an average decline of 10%; AMD currently has an average premium of 47%, with an average decline of 13%.

The domestic price reduction momentum is also obvious. The graphics card with an average price of more than 8,000 yuan in February has now fallen to about 6,000 yuan in the starting price, and some models have even fallen below the starting price.

In Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen, the price of RTX 3080 graphics card is generally around 7,000~8,000 yuan, and the price before the Spring Festival is more than 10,000 yuan. When the market was hottest, the price of an RTX 3080 with unlocked computing power was as high as 14,000 yuan.

Some merchants in Huaqiangbei and most other parties believe that the entry of a large number of "mining cards" into the market is an important reason for the avalanche of graphics card prices. "Mining card" is a graphics card used for cryptocurrency mining. When the price of cryptocurrency rises, a large number of graphics cards will be used for mining, and the price of cryptocurrency will drop. "Mining card" will flow into the second-hand market and even be packaged as a "new card" .

The latest round of cryptocurrency rally has lasted for 20 months, which is one of the reasons why the price of high-end graphics cards has remained at a 20-month high. Since the end of last year, the price of Bitcoin with the highest market value has been declining, indicating that this round of mining frenzy is coming to an end. During this period, the number of "mining cards" used for mining was far more than the number of willing buyers. Some people said that these graphics cards "will inevitably be sold by the catty".

Cryptocurrency prices are indeed an important factor affecting the price of graphics cards. The higher the price, the more people will be attracted to mine; the lower the price, the fewer people will be mining. The use of graphics cards for mining is determined by the PoW (Proof of Work) form used by the cryptocurrency. The original design of Satoshi Nakamoto was to generate Bitcoin by consuming CPU power and time, just like a gold mine consumes resources and injects gold into economic circulation.

This process is called "Proof of Work" because only those participants (miners) who prove that they have invested enough resources (work) have a chance to win a reward (Bitcoin).

Initially, Bitcoin miners all mine through CPU. Since mining is a computing-intensive application, with the continuous improvement of the number of miners and the performance of equipment, the difficulty gradually increases. The hardware feature of the graphics card is that there are thousands of stream processors, which can just perform a large number of repeated general operations.

The basic algorithm principle is, for example, take all the existing transactions within 10 minutes as an input, add a random number, and calculate a SHA256 hash, which is almost all integer operations - almost like the "nothing" for the graphics card. "Brain Computing" is custom-made. Therefore, in terms of cost and efficiency, graphics card mining is more "good and cheap".

Ethereum transformation, M1 does not talk about Wood

In addition to the decline in the price of bitcoin, there are three important factors driving the price of graphics cards.

The first is that the underlying logic of earning cryptocurrency has changed.

Cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, etc.) are all based on the PoW model. The more computing power and the longer the mining time, the more coins you will get. According to the mining equipment, it is simply divided into two categories, and there are many overlaps between the two categories.

One is Asic mining currency, which includes Bitcoin series, including BTC, BCH, BSV, mining equipment is Asic mining machine based on SHA-256 algorithm; there are also LTC, ZEC, DASH, DCR, Grin and other currencies, The device is an Asic miner with a specific algorithm.

The other type is GPU (graphics card) mining currency. The ether system mainly includes ETH and ETC. The equipment is mainly GPU mining machines; Grin, Beam, XMR, AE and other small currencies rely on GPU mining.

As the second-largest cryptocurrency project by market value, Ethereum announced its upgrade to ETH2.0 at the end of last year. The consensus mechanism will be switched from PoW to PoS (Proof of Stake) , and the system will decide based on the number of participants and the time they hold. The packaging rights it has been assigned—to put it bluntly, means that the generation of new coins no longer relies on contributing computing power to compete for accounting rights, but instead becomes a dividend for holding ETH.

Therefore, a type of virtual currency that was originally mined by graphics cards does not need to be “mined” anymore. A large number of “mining cards” have retired and flowed into the market. Mine's graphics card is battered and underperforming.

Secondly, Apple's M1 chip came out, which became a straw that crushed the market price of high-end graphics cards. In 2021, Apple's new MacBook Pro equipped with M1 Pro and M1 Max chips will have a display effect comparable to that of Windows laptops equipped with discrete graphics cards, and the integrated core display has more obvious advantages in terms of power consumption and heat generation.

Apple claims that the M1 Max can reduce power consumption by 100W and display performance close to or even higher than Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 chip. If you simply run the score, the M1 MAX is indeed no worse than the RTX 3080, but if you run "Tomb Raider: Shadow", it can only reach the level of 1050 Ti. However, this is also related to the fact that game software is generally not developed for MacOS.

NVIDIA and AMD's graphics card business, the sense of crisis has increased, and the false fire that has been "hyped up" has naturally declined.

In addition, since July last year, the production capacity of the semiconductor industry has rebounded, increasing the supply of graphics cards and bursting the bubble of graphics cards.

TSMC, the world's largest semiconductor foundry, announced a three-year capacity investment plan of $100 billion (about 637 billion yuan); Samsung also plans to invest 170 trillion won (about 1 trillion yuan) before 2030, hoping Catch up with TSMC.

Can everything be "currency"?

The high price of graphics cards is mainly caused by "mining". Everyone is flocking to "mining", mainly because of the soaring prices of various cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin hit a high of $60,000 and has now retreated by more than $40,000, while Ether is over $20,000. As long as you open the "Encrypted Digital Currency Real-time Quotes" page, the price fluctuation curve of 200 currencies is dazzling.

Bitcoin comes from the utopian vision of "one CPU, one vote" by the founder Satoshi Nakamoto. The decentralized blockchain record mode adopted is essentially an anarchist project, which has led to cryptocurrency supporters and regulations. struggles and conflicts between proponents and governments.

The Yorkshire coiners, 1767-1783. And notes on old and prehistoric Halifax), describes the fate of a group of 18th-century minters and counterfeiters. This group of people living in a small village called Cragwell in West Yorkshire, England, were sentenced to death by processing and "repairing" coins in order to build an anarchist economy.

With the recent outbreak of the epidemic in Shanghai, living materials are relatively tight, many residents "barter", and cats have become "hard currency". Some netizens asked their orange cat to go to a neighbor's house to "open" in exchange for three oranges. Maomao is not a currency, but it temporarily functions as a transaction intermediary.

Similar to the orange cat under special circumstances, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have the functions of value measurement, transaction intermediary, and payment tools, but in the real world, currency is defined as "institutional currency" issued by a country or region, The "purchasing power" of a country or region is backed by its economic strength, that is, the value of a good or service. From this perspective, Bitcoin is certainly not a "currency", but it is the best investment product after 2008.

An ad for app-based cryptocurrency exchange crypto.com starring Hollywood actor Matt Damon. He said: “History is full of near misses – people who almost took risks, people who came close to achieving great things…but there are others too – people who embrace the moment and commit themselves…God bless the brave.”

The "high return" of God Bless the Brave is really tempting. A recent example is Solana, a blockchain that launched in 2020 and whose backed tokens are up 22,000% by the end of 2021, according to financial research firm Autonomous — all from the fear of “buy it or miss it” .

Many people like to compare Bitcoin to gold. There is no denying that Bitcoin has outperformed gold in returns over the past 10 years. However, compared to gold, Bitcoin is less able to withstand geopolitical shocks, and its role as an inflation hedge has not been tested.

Investment in cryptocurrencies ultimately affects the price of graphics cards. In fact, the rise and fall of hardware prices is only a superficial issue of our concern.

Just like the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) estimates that 2.3 million adults in the UK own cryptocurrency assets. How many of them understand blockchain technology and monetary finance, and what it means to simply have unreproducible strings of computer code, is a pretty big question, and the fundamental question behind the booms and busts of buying and selling.