One of the unexpected consequences of the bitcoin trend has been its impact on specialized graphics processing units (GPUs), which the miners find very useful for the sort of calculations necessary to verify the transactions and thus earn cryptocurrency for themselves. From The Motley Fool:
The conundrum has been that soaring cryptocurrency prices have angered both NVIDIA’s and AMD’s core gaming customers. Rising graphics card prices have made it difficult for these core customers to upgrade, or even replace their graphics cards, should they need to. NVIDIA and AMD were left with a choice: Either risk their long-term success by alienating their core customer, or increase GPU supply and risk cratering near-term GPU prices (and thusly their own margins). As we now know following their respective quarterly reports, these companies have chosen the latter.
Understandably, meeting GPU demand won’t happen overnight. In late March, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang admitted that his company still has a long way to go in an interview with TechCrunch. Said Huang, “We’re sold out of many of our high-end SKUs, and so it’s a real challenge keeping [graphics cards] in the marketplace for games … we have to build a whole lot more.” AMD has echoed this challenge, suggesting that its ramp-up of GPU production may be limited by the ability of its memory partners to meet demand.
While there’s always a certain amount of demand for high end computing resources, this unexpected competition for resources is certainly an interesting aspect of the entire scenario.
I wonder if the computations are amenable to public computing, a la the SETI@Home effort. If so, and if you could find some way to convince your everyday user to dedicate part of their machine to the calculations, that might be a way to alleviate the problem, and even decentralize the generation of the currency, which is a problem noted here.
