[News] NVIDIA's Next Gen GPU Launch Held Back to Drain Excess, Costly Built-up Invent

[StyM]

https://www.techpowerup.com/245399/n...t-up-inventory

We've previously touched upon whether or not NVIDIA should launch their 1100 or 2000 series of graphics cards ahead of any new product from AMD. At the time, I wrote that I only saw benefits to that approach: earlier time to market -> satisfaction of upgrade itches and entrenchment as the only latest-gen manufacturer -> raised costs over lack of competition -> ability to respond by lowering prices after achieving a war-chest of profits. However, reports of a costly NVIDIA mistake in overestimating demand for its Pascal GPUs does lend some other shades to the whole equation.

Write-offs in inventory are costly (just ask Microsoft), and apparently, NVIDIA has found itself in a miscalculating demeanor: overestimating gamers' and miners' demand for their graphics cards. When it comes to gamers, NVIDIA's Pascal graphics cards have been available in the market for two years now - it's relatively safe to say that the majority of gamers who needed higher-performance graphics cards have already taken the plunge. As to miners, the cryptocurrency market contraction (and other factors) has led to a taper-out of graphics card demand for this particular workload. The result? NVIDIA's demand overestimation has led, according to Seeking Alpha, to a "top three" Taiwan OEM returning 300,000 GPUs to NVIDIA, and "aggressively" increased GDDR5 buying orders from the company, suggesting an excess stock of GPUs that need to be made into boards.

[waxbytes]

So it's a Corporate "boo-boo" and their likely to wait as long as possible to launch new product. Possibly even waiting till AMD launches their new GPUs? I can handle the wait, and my wallet is sure happy.

[madcho]

Sadly they don't lower prices ...

[EternityZX9]

As Madcho said. There's a really simple solution - lower prices.

I personally didn't expect a new nvidia GPU until September-ish but now with this...who knows.

[StAndrew]

Either they are milking the money train and this is just news fodder or they got caught milking the money train and over estimated. Either way, like with Intel, it will be nice when some competition returns.

[bluestang]

Excess inventory from the failed GPP possibly lol.

[iddqd]

When you owe the bank $2000, you have a problem. When you owe the bank $2,000,000,000, the bank has a problem.
Just so - if you're Nvidia, and one of your AIB partners built up an inventory of 300K pascal chips in anticipation of mining demand that evaporated, that AIB has a problem (and will likely go bankrupt). If all your AIBs built up an inventory of 300K+ pascal chips, suddenly you have a probelm - you can't just allow all your AIB partners to fail. Who would make the boards, then?

Edit: AMD clearly has learned a lot from making the same mistake in the rx290 days, and has elected not to supply any Vega chips to their AIB partners. Well-done, AMD!