Linus Tech Tips Discussion

increase of memory chip prices. AMD also announced the potential cancellation of their RX 9070 GRE 16GB card over the skyrocketing of memory prices. Another area that is impacted is the handheld market, as some consoles like the OneXPlayer AMD Strix Halo handheld receiving a $200 increase in pricing due to the increase in memory pricing as well.  with   over the  My thoughts If the rumors Golden Pig Upgrade mentioned turned out to be true, AIBs WILL have to subsidize the lack of memory by increasing the pricing of their cards, which could be a substantial increase if the OneXPlayer is an example to go by. This could directly impact new graphics cards and indirectly impact second hand graphics cards, as more would be inclined to salvage GDDR6, GDDR6X and GDDR7 chips from consumer cards or dead boards to resell or double the memory of higher end cards to utilize running local AI models, a famous mod that's often seen in the Asian and South American markets but also exists in Europe as a service. This AI "bubble" impacts EVERY piece of technology made recently, which also includes vehicles and phones. China's SMIC went on the record to state this in an earnings call about the shortage of chips.   Quote “Everyone is hesitant to place too many orders or ship too much in the first quarter of next year because they don’t know how many mobile phones, cars, or other products [the memory chip industry] can supply,” said Zhao Haijun, SMIC’s co-CEO, according to a Google translation. ( . . . ) “The AI build-out is absolutely eating up a lot of the available chip supply, and 2026 looks to be far bigger than this year in terms of overall demand,” Dan Nystedt, vice president of research at TriOrient, told CNBC. When considering graphics cards, any card released after 2018 will be a good source to salvage memory chips from. This means every card from RTX 20 and AMD's RX 6000 series onward might see a sizeable bump in pricing on the second hand market, especially the newer RTX 50 cards as they use the sought after GDDR7 chips. This will destroy sub $500 PC builds as we know it, making budget builds a thing of the past as RAM, GPUs and SSDs will stay affected for months to come - this might also be a bad thing for currently manufactured cards like the Arc B580, a card that Linus regularly checks its pricing at NewEgg on the WAN Show. Instances of times where he mentioned the card are [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] and more that I couldn't list here. It was important for the card to be available at or near MSRP as promised, and this might throw a huge wrench into things if the trend continues upwards.   For reference, below are some cards that are either being manufactured or have replaced a discontinued card. GDDR6/X chips are still actively used despite being EOL by manufacturers like Samsung due to the existence of a huge stock of them, look at how NVIDIA replaced the 4070 GDDR6X with the GDD