GPU and CPU stagnation in 2021
How did we as an industry get to the point where chip shortages have started to negatively impact the daily drivers of massive industries. In order to explain the shortage of GPU’s and CPU’s we must first go into a bit of trivial details.The year 2021 has started with a massive rush towards crypto-currencies and ECR721 based tokens, long waiting lines for luxury entertainment systems and an overabundance of unspent capital due to the pandemic forcing more people indoors. The onset of the year was met with higher levels of financial speculation and in some cases negative credit due to fiat currencies being printed and distributed generously. This in turn led businesses and speculators to invest in lucrative futures and experimental crypto-currencies in a hope to avoid the unavoidable impending global economic crash.
Today we have more crypto-currency exchanges than ever before and in order to for these exchanges to be validated someone or something needs to verify the transactions, encrypt the transactions and then share them on the block-chain. The block-chain is, for a better word, a shared network of machines that validate and encrypt all transactions that are located all over the world and owned by private companies, ordinary individuals and any one who is willing to lend their machine in exchange for a small pay out. These machines will take a challenge and try and complete a perfect set of exchanges and encrypt them within their respective crypto-currency blocks. To be honest there is more to this than one small paragraph can describe but we will go into block chain technologies in another blog post. The popular term in crypto circles for this process is called “mining” and in order to “mine” crypto-currencies one must use chips. These chips then can come in the form of ANT-miners or GPU’s. Some coins can be mined on CPU’s as well. As anyone can see, if there is a lucrative business to be made than the resources used to make it would be bought out and put to work but crypto-currencies are not the reason for the shortage.
There has been a massive spike in mobile device sales in the last 10 years and 2021 does not seem to be halting this progress. In truth within the last 2 years tablet sales all over the world have increased. In the USA we had a huge surge due to a government pushed mandate known as the ELD mandate that forces all drivers to use digital electronic logging devices for their hours of service. These devices are made up of tablets, GPS tracking devices and dash cams.
The average user today has some form of smart mobile device. When you think about the fact that there are 7.8 billion people on the planet and that at least 2 billion of them have access to this technology you start to see the actual problem. Today there are more people using these devices than ever before unfortunately our tech industry was never designed to actually cater to such a large audience.
We must also remember that the automotive and transportation industries heavily rely on the micro-processors and chips that control the cars, trucks, buses, planes, boats and trains the produce. Chips have been pushed into everything without any after thought about how we would handle the day when chip production could not keep up with demand.
Governments have also started upgrading their infrastructures. They started adding new surveillance systems all over the world. There has been a huge surge in server distribution and an increase in cloud service providers.
After shortly listing a few of the current challenges and uses of our high grade silicon it seems that GPU and CPU shortages are only the beginning. Chips simply cannot be produced at the rate at which they are consumed. To add there is no way to recycle the electronic goods as the market dictates that re-use is unacceptable as the devices are too slow and too old to use anymore. Many of the electronic device developers purposefully create their goods to be hard to repair in order to push consumers to buy new devices which in turn leads to our current predicament of huge electronic waste, an unsustainable purge of tech resources and economic destabilization.
In the next few years the consumption of chips will grow to the point that there will hardly be enough chips for everyone unless we find a better way to create, use and distribute them. Due to the stress on the current system it is inevitable that these shortages will create a great increase in prices due to demand. If the governments of the world keep ignoring the issue at hand we will be met with global monopolies like never before as the biggest businesses buy up all the chip manufacturers. Car manufactures will be at the mercy of these businesses like many other industries that need these parts in order to function.
So before we think about why we cannot find any GPU’s or CPU’s, or if we do find them at a huge mark up, we should start thinking about what this actually means. The reason why the computer market has been hit hard with shortages and why there is a boom in chip manufacturer sales is due to a massive sink hole in the system. All of these manufacturers might be taking the whole world to the bank but what will happen once they can no longer sustain the supply for the demand for all the other sectors of industry. I can only journey to guess that we will see an economic disaster like never before.
So we here at Bard Tech have started with our repurposed and re-use initiative. We believe that in order to do our part we must start with the basics. If a server can be repaired we will repair it. We build our solutions around the long term use rather that short term profits. In the next few weeks we will be putting together something special that might help everyone in order to better the industry and all of our tech lives. Until then remember that you do not really need to upgrade but rather use your knowledge and fix what you can.
Post was last modified: November 24 2021 19:24:41
