Hardware manufacturers continue to feel the effects of the 2011 Thai floods.
In the summer of last year, Thailand was hit with some disastrous flooding that continues to affect HDD companies and and the supply of hard drives. It's not unusual to hear HDD companies and tech analysts talk about the flooding and how it is affecting the industry. However, joining the refrain are companies with no stake in the HDD industry. They say that the shortage of hard drives has impacted PC shipments and, as such, had an effect on their businesses.
The Verge reports that both AMD and Nvidia have said the shortage of HDDs resulting from the flooding has had an impact on sales. Though neither expected to see any impact from the 2011 floods, recent earnings calls have revealed that they are feeling a squeeze due to the hard drive shortage.
Nvidia yesterday told investors it earned approximately $116 million less revenue than it had anticipated and is putting at least some of the blame on the hard drive shortage. Meanwhile, AMD also told investors that it was seeing "a little bit of pressure" thanks to the shortage.
Though neither are in the hard drive business, they say the decline in computer shipments has affected graphics processor sales because fewer computers shipped means less demand for components.
Totally agree with this. If one manufacturer were to lower prices would could have seen a huge sift from HDD to SSD.
I wonder how memory's doing? In theory the OEMs could still order less memory and use their overstock to fill more slots in the machines they make/sell, perhaps charging slight premiums for making 6GB and 8GB more common.
They are talking about their commercial contracts where HP/Dell or anyone else who orders millions of dollars worth of product from Nvidia and AMD at a time for their computer and server line ups.
Consumer sales are small potatoes in the over all outlook.
i say this all the time THEY CANT, physical limits dont allow them to sell ssds at lower prices, go over to the intel article about the 14nm fab they are building, i did some math on what ssds will cost with that process and with the larger wafer size.
again if i knew how big the die size of a ssd chip was, i could do math based on that, but till than, i can only do math based on price.
no, i dont see the coloration, mainly because most pre built computers have integrated, and i cant see intergrated pulling in more than 116 million dollars in loss. are gpus used in servers normally? if so i can see it now.
and to get a decent warrenty you have to buy an enterprise drive, and those things are 450$ minimum for i think 2tb, what were they before flood?
1) There is never been any real HDD shortage, the HDD prices were hijacked even when they were safely
dry, right here in the US. They didn't even got wet, yet the prices skyrocketed.
2) Even if "new PC's" was even an excuse, Neither AMD or Nvidia sell high end graphic cards for pre-built PC's. Their real market is the "enthusiast market" which upgrades (or build) their system(s).
This people (myself included) have a lot of hard drives already or have moved to SSD's. (or both)
This is just a scheme to hijacked their prices, hope that people don't fall for it.
Nvidia & AMD Say HDD Shortage is Impacting GPU Sales : Read more
As good of an idea as this may sound on paper, I don't see that it is currently feasable otherwise it would already happen. The reason being is that people have known well for years that NAND flash is expensive and the hard drive industry is completely separate from the microchip industry. They are two different things entirely. One does not depend on the other. So yeah I "wish" that I could get a 1TB NAND based solution for 50 bucks but will it happen? that depends on the manufacturing process costs, not how much a hard disk costs or if hard drive companies are having a difficult time meeting demand. Demand can stay high or low on NAND but it isn't going to change the fact that it is expensive to manufacture opposed to a perfectly working hard drive foundry.
There are people who speculate that prices may drop on SSD by the middle of this year, but it is speculation until it does or doesn't happen. I hope that it falls but I'm not holding my breath.
As far as on topic of GPU prices, if those fall then that is fine because I was thinking about getting a 600 series nvidia card anyway (although I really don't need one, which is one key thing too a lot of people already have video cards that run everything well and really don't have a reason to spend more money on a new one) I sold my 9800 gtx+ and bought a 260 core 216 but I didn't really need to do that so that kinda taught me that even thoguh you might want to get 60fps in a certain game, spending money on it is worthwhile if you are actually going to play the game for more than an hour or two which I pretty much didn't.
Anyway I think I've been in the gaming hobby too long so although I can run out and buy new parts if I want to, it isn't really that big of a need. I guess these price concerns are more for high school kids that don't have much money anyway.