Is NVIDIA reprioritizing the manufacturing of its graphics chips? First supply bottlenecks for the older GeForce RTX 2060

Not only Asian media like ITHome speculate that NVIDIA will discontinue the Turing graphics cards in the form of the GeForce RTX 2060 or GTX 16xx series, which were relaunched earlier this year as a gap filler, in the foreseeable future. If you ask various board partners about their forecasts and the current delivery situation, it becomes clear pretty quickly that this presumed process has probably already begun. While AIC generally describes the overall supply situation as “very tight”, the availability of the GeForce RTX 2060 with the TU106 manufactured in 12 nm at TSMC already seems to be completely close to zero (“no supply”).

ITHome is now speculating that NVIDIA may be planning to ramp up production of GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs by cutting off shipments of its older GPUs. This is citing tech insiders in the Asia-Pacific region who expect NVIDIA to cut shipments of older GPUs in half to focus on the brand new chips. While such prioritization is understandable, the old Turing chips are predominantly manufactured by TSMC, but the Ampere chips are manufactured by Samsung. At first glance, this wouldn’t make much sense, because NVIDIA is deliberately using two tracks because Samsung’s resources are limited.

There is now speculation at some AIC that Turing support may have merely shifted towards the smaller CMP cards (special cards for miners). So NVIDIA would continue to dual-track, but would no longer fully offer these older products to the consumer market. Here one can only speculate about the acceptance and sales of the CMP cards, which do find sales. The effect of the LHR (low hash rate) brake on a few (but important) cryptocurrencies continues, as it hasn’t really been leveraged yet.

So we will have to watch the situation on the market of digital currencies more closely in the coming weeks, which fluctuates extremely daily, but currently shows no real recovery and approaches for new highs. If this rather negative trend continues, then one could well expect a certain relaxation of the graphics card.Market in the second half of 2021. However, one can only speculate when the availability on the end customer market and thus ultimately also the prices will return to normal. Because this kind of thing usually takes a little longer.

I will at least try to continue to follow the prices of the brokers, because exactly these traders, who are so driven by efficiency, usually react very nervously to any indicator, no matter how small. So far, at least, nothing further could be deduced. Except for the complete unavailability of the GeForce RTX 2060.