Things are looking grim.
First, it was the scalpers sucking up all the available CPU & GPU inventory they can & flogging it off at obscene prices. Now Crypto currencies are booming again and GPU supply is going to be even tighter than it already is. Apparently Crypto miners are even buying laptops with RTX 3000 GPUs to set up as miners as even with their deep pockets they can't get enough GPUs at a reasonable price.

And the problems in the chip supply chain are showing no signs of abating. Releases of new consoles, new GPUs, new CPUs, new phone models aver the same time frame & the ongoing impacts of Covid have resulted in what would have been a short sharp peak in demand turning in to one never ending demand exceeding supply problem.
Car manufacturers are even scaling back their production due to shortages of chips for their vehicles.


Unless you've got bucket loads of money, and are lucky with your timing, the only chance for new hardware over then next 6-12 months will be a system from Dell, HP, Acer etc- and even they may start to have issues as their product demand increases, but their contracts were made based on the previous lower volumes.

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Grant
Darwin NT

dont forget that Chinese New Year is approaching as well, factory workers take a long holiday and production all but stops country-wide.

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Seti@Home classic workunits: 29,492 CPU time: 134,419 hours

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Grant
Darwin NT

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Grant
Darwin NT

A dog's love for his master knows no limitations . . . . even when head is used as a mousepad.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

The low end of the market appears to have gone totally mad with the sensible-priced units having doubled or more in the last few months :-(

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

The low end of the market appears to have gone totally mad with the sensible-priced units having doubled or more in the last few months :-(

If you can get them at all. I think I might need a warranty replacement, but the store I got it from says the manufacturer is likely to just offer me a refund. But there are no replacements to be bought anywhere.

I couldn't get a clear explanation out of him, but it seemed to be a mish-mash of working from home, closed factories, closed chip fabs, shipping troubles, coin hunters, and any other disaster you care to mention.

I was looking around here in Sweden for possibly upgrading my now old GTX980 GPU. I hadn't paid attention at all to what seems to have happened with the GPU market.
There's no way in he** that I will pay the prices they want for something better than my GTX980. I'll wait until sanity have returned to the GPU market, even if that means
that my old GTX980 goes up in smoke, and I have to use the iGPU only.

Geeze..... pure insanity.

Current estimates for "normal" to return are mid next year- at the very earliest.
See my previous post.

And here's an article from just the other day.

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Grant
Darwin NT

My youngest daughter inquired of me building her a new gaming PC last week and she was flabbergasted when I told her that just the cost of a suitable GPU would cost more than what it cost to build her whole last rig.

So she'll be holding off for a while on doing that.

Cheers.

Hot DRAM: Shortage of memory chips will continue this year, says Micron

US memory maker Micron Technology expects the chronic shortage of DRAM in the market to continue throughout this year, according to senior veep and CFO David Zinsner.

Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom virtual conference, Zinsner claimed supply of DRAM will be “really tight.”

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My youngest daughter inquired of me building her a new gaming PC last week and she was flabbergasted when I told her that just the cost of a suitable GPU would cost more than what it cost to build her whole last rig.

So she'll be holding off for a while on doing that.

Cheers.

I was able to build a few low end systems for a few of my young nephews just to play games like minecraft or fortnite. cleared out a lot of my low end parts with their parents really only having to front a couple hundred bucksfor things to finish the builds (case/power supply/etc). perks of having a bunch of stuff laying around I guess haha.

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Seti@Home classic workunits: 29,492 CPU time: 134,419 hours

Same here, the upgraded parts sit on the shelf until 80% of a build accumulates. Then build a PC from the parts and pass it down to family member and friends.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Dutch engineer and inventor Lou Ottens, best known for inventing the cassette tape, died on March 6. He was 94.

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Grant
Darwin NT

A very interesting short article on Wafer manufacturing defect detection, making use of AI.

As a highly competitive industry, the semiconductor industry is also extremely time sensitive. Modern companies have to develop new chips, bug fix them, and then launch them all on fairly tight schedules. Nowadays it takes years to develop an advanced chip and several months to actually fabricate a batch. One of the most crucial time parameters is time to yield, which is to say being able to provide a large number of chips with high enough yields. A chip designer may have the most efficient architecture around, but if they cannot get it made in high volumes, they'll still lose out on money and market share. Even foundries feel this pinch, as the time needed to fix defects and bring lines up to snuff represents millions of dollars in equipment depreciation alone – one week of a 3nm fab downtime is expected to cost $25 million in unamortized depreciation costs. So achieving acceptable time to yield metrics heavily depends on a fab's ability to detect and fix yield-killing defects.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Yes, I read that article too. Very interesting in using AI to profile the visual wafer inspection to find defects at all the interim stages of fabricating the wafer.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Now for something completely different- Booting DOS, from a vinyl record.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Thong logic.

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Grant
Darwin NT

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Grant
Darwin NT

So true and so sad.
There was a time when upgrading would be increasing CPU clock, and performance more than accordingly.

Now clock cannot be pushed up so much, and you get tons of CPUs, which are seldom exploited efficiently for the reasons so well depicted by your picture.

In short, the better you can aim to obtain is "slowly" running many tasks in parallel.
But if you want to get one single job done very quickly (and much quicker than in the past), options are much more uncertain.

Sleepy

London WC1

Gentlemen,

With due deference, I crave your indulgence upon a somewhat vexing technical matter.

I have, perhaps foolishly, recently purchased one of these modern devices called laptops. The reasons are irrelevant. What is pertinent though, is how the dickens to install extra memory (ram).

I can see that two sliders need to be moved to release the battery, but which o f the myriad screws on the back do you undo to release access to the RAM slots?

A foray into the Web has not resulted in a manual for download, or a set of instructions. The manufacturers site only has users handbooks to download. Therefore I am at the mercy of your kind advice.

The item concerned is a Toshiba Tecra, A40-C-1DF.

My grateful thanks to anyone that could help.

Sidney J. Snodgrass (CDM + Bar)