For the past couple of months, there has been a global chip shortage in the tech industry. Companies like Intel, Samsung and others have said that products have been delayed and overall the market has been impacted. It’s not just delays as prices too seem to have skyrocketed. The price of GPUs in gaming PCs and laptops, however, may have risen because of a rather unusual reason — cryptocurrency.
According to a report by The Economist, which cites data from Keepa, the prices of GPUs have increased a lot compared to CPUs. For instance, the Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics card which generally sells around $700 dollars has sold for as high as $2,500.
The data from Keepa suggests that Ethereum — the second largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin — miners may have pushed the prices of GPUs. The heart and soul of gaming machines reportedly excel at matrix algebra and is generally good at machine learning. The report suggests that it also a great tool for mining Ethereum.
The data from Keepa also reveals that in the last six years the prices of GPUs have been very much in sync with Ethereum’s value. For example, in 2020, the price of Ethereum went up from $107 to $4400, the prices of GPUs also went up. However, currently, Etherum’s price is down 40% but GPU prices haven’t fallen down.
The report by The Economist says that Ethereum miners could “rejig” its blockchain to require less computation, which could lead to GPU prices falling down.
It must be said that the production of gaming chipsets have also been rather slow, which too has led to higher prices. If the production does go up, then the costs of GPUs will also be expected to go down. Till Ehtereum miners find an ‘alternative’ way, gaming machines will continue to cost a lot more than they used to.
