In the midst of the silicon shortage brace for yet more bad news
In the midst of the silicon shortage Mark Williams is bracing for yet more bad news.
We had hoped the worldwide silicon chip shortage would start clearing up by the end of this year, but all indications are showing that it will be unlikely. With graphics cards still in peak demand and Nvidia and AMD now revising their forecasts from the second half of this year now into next year before supply finally catches up with demand, with the same forecasted for PlayStation 5 stocks, it looks like “winter has come”, as the Game of Thrones mantra goes.
Unfortunately, just when you think the silicon shortage couldn’t possibly get any worse, it does.
Despite the big chip makers pumping out record previously unheard-of numbers of products into the market, and although general consumer demand is by far the main factor for the supply shortage, crypto miners snapping up hardware is a very real concern, effectively preventing cards from getting to end users.
As Nvidia is on the cusp of rolling out its new Ti line of cards, touting hefty crypto restrictions to prevent miners from wanting to buy them, a new kind of crypto mining has just been launched that is shaping up to affect the market yet again. Chia is the name of a new Cryptocurrency designed by Bram Cohen, famously known for inventing BitTorrent, that was designed from the ground up to be a more power-efficient type of Cryptocurrency. Instead of the current energy-intensive “proof of work” model that Bitcoin uses, Chia uses a “proof of space and time” method that is substantially more efficient.
Chia works by creating cryptographic blocks (files) on your storage device called plots, which are cryptographically unique. Creating these plots is quite CPU and memory intensive not to mention write intensive to the drive. Once the plot is generated the plots effectively sit idle (farming) waiting for their unique Crypto number to be called by the Chia network, awarding the lucky owner Chia currency as part of their plot gets added to the blockchain on the network. Being a lottery, the more tickets (plots) you have, the more chances you have of winning. And as each plot can be up to 108GB in size, drive space suddenly becomes a top priority. Which is why not long after the announcement of Chia’s launch, reports started surfacing from China where high-capacity SSD and HDD drives were being snapped up en masse, causing their prices locally to quadruple!
Speaking to Richard from Aftershock PC, he confirmed that word is coming from his suppliers that a drive shortage is coming and will likely hit Australia soon once current stock levels are worked through.
And if the demand issue wasn’t bad enough, demand from Chia miners will likely continue as Chia plotting is so disk write intensive, where each 108GB plot requires 1.8TB of host writes to the drive. As a result, Chia miners are finding their cheap 256GB SSDs are surpassing the drives’ rated Terabytes Written (TBW) write endurance ratings and becoming inert and unusable within a month of usage, forcing those miners to go buy yet more drives to continue farming with.
It certainly seems like a bleak time ahead for anyone wanting to buy or build a PC this year. When will the madness stop?
“Not long after the announcement of Chia’s launch, reports started surfacing from China where high-capacity SSD and HDD drives were being snapped up en masse, causing their prices locally to quadruple!”