We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games.

People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.

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TeMPOraL 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.

They probably won't, but those willing to drop $3-10k will be if the consumer and data-center computing diverge at the architectural level. It's the classical hollowing out the middle - most of the offerings end up in a race-to-the-bottom chasing volume of price-sensitive customers, the quality options lose economies of scale and disappear, and the high-end becomes increasingly bespoke/pricey, or splits off into a distinct market with an entirely different type of customers (here: DC vs. individuals).

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m3nu 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My bet is that phone hardware will be used more and more in mini PCs and laptops keeping the cost down and volume up. We see it with Apple and many Chinese mini PC makers I looked at.

	▲	riskable 12 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If this ends up being true, desktop Linux adoption might make inroads. Windows apps run like crap on ARM and no one is bothering to make ARM builds of their software.
	▲	Lord-Jobo 15 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Unified hardware helps some and hurts some. See: same gpus for gaming and for AI.

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bparsons 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem is that there is a very large incentive for three large companies to corner the market on computing components, forcing consumers to rent access instead of owning.

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molszanski 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> We won't be in a supply crunch forever.

This what always happens in capitalism. Scarcity is almost always followed by glut

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drecked 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I don’t believe we are seeing the investments necessary that would indicate this will happen.

Memory makers, for example, have sold out their inventory for several years, but instead of investing to manufacture more, they’re shutting down their consumer divisions. They’re just transferring their consumer supply to their B2B (read AI) supply instead.

Thats likely because they don’t expect this demand to last past a few years.

	▲	fmajid 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		They have seen boom and bust cycles previously and are understandably wary of expanding capacity for expected demand that may fizzle. If they stay too conservative, China’s CXMT is chomping at the bit to eat their lunch, backed by the Chinese government, but that’s not going to help until late 2027 at best.
	▲	bitmasher9 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If the demand lasts for a few years, I’m doubtful that all of the consumer capacity will come back.

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close04 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> We'll have a demand crunch

This is what I'm afraid of. As more stuff moves to the cloud helped in part by the current prices of HW, the demand for consumer hardware will drop. This will keep turning the vicious cycle of rising consumer HW prices and more moves to the cloud.

I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud gaming platform. If a GPU is so expensive, you move to a rental model and the subsequent drop in demand will make GPUs even more expensive. They're far from the only ones with dollar signs in their eyes, between the money and total control over customers this future could bring.

Being entirely reliant on someone else's software and hardware is a bleak thought for a person used to some degree of independence and self sufficiency in the tech world.

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HKH2 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud gaming platform.

Roblox is not popular because of its graphics. Younger gamers care more about having fun than having an immersive experience.

	▲	close04 5 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think we're talking about 2 different things. I'm not sure where Roblox fits into what I said. Nvidia was just an example of this because they stand out. GPUs are so expensive now that many gamers were eying GeForce Now as a viable long term solution for gaming. Just recently there was a discussion on HN about GeForce Now where a lot of comments were "I can pay for 10 years of GeForce Now with the price of a 5090, and that's before counting electricity". All upsides, right? In parallel Nvidia is probably seeing more money in the datacenter market so would rather focus the available production capacity there. Once enough gamers move away from local compute, the demand is unlikely to come back so future generations of GPUs would get more and more expensive to cater for an ever shrinking market. This is the vicious cycle. Expensive GPU + cheap cloud gaming > shrinking GPU market and higher GPU prices > more of step 1. Roblox is one example of a game, there are many popular games that aren't graphics intensive or don't rely on eye candy. But what about all the other games that require beefy GPU to run? Gamers will want to play them, and Nvidia like most other companies sees more value in recurring revenue than in one time sales. A GPU you own won't bring Nvidia money later, a subscription keeps doing that.
	▲	hombre_fatal 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Yeah, this gamer conspiracy theory never made sense to me. Also, if gamers demand infinitely improving graphics so much that they would rather pay for cloud gaming than relax their expectations and be happy with, say, current gen graphics, then that is more a claim about modern self-pwned gamer behavior than megacorp conspiracy. But I don't buy that either. The biggest games on Steam Charts and Twitch aren't AAA RTX 5090 games.
	▲	foobarian 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I love it when I get my Robloxhead daughter to test drive some of the games I play on my 5090 box. "Ooooh these graphics are unreal" "Can we stop for just a moment and admire this grass" :-D