Were you able to score one of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs? Consider yourself lucky, as other enthusiasts may not be able to get their hands on one until 2021. That’s according to green team’s outspoken CEO, Jensen Huang, who spoke during a recent Q&A (via Tom’s Hardware) and suggested that GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090 shortages would persist through the remainder of the year.
“I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply through the year,” Huang said. “Remember, we’re also going into the double-whammy. The double-whammy is the holiday season. Even before the holiday season, we were doing incredibly well, and then you add on top of it the ‘Ampere factor,’ and then you add on top of that the ‘Ampere holiday factor,’ and we’re going to have a really really big Q4 season.”
Huang goes on to state that the fundamental problem with the GeForce RTX 30 Series lies in its popularity. Apparently, NVIDIA had no idea it would generate so much interest. “Phenomenon” appears to be the key word here, with Huang comparing the success of the Ampere flagships with legendary products such as Windows 95 and Pentium processors.
“The 3080 and 3090 have a demand issue, not a supply issue,” said Huang. “The demand issue is that it is much much greater than we expected — and we expected really a lot.”
“Retailers will tell you they haven’t seen a phenomenon like this in over a decade of computing. It hearkens back to the old days of Windows 95 and Pentium when people were just out of their minds to buy this stuff. So this is a phenomenon like we’ve not seen in a long time, and we just weren’t prepared for it.”
“Even if we knew about all the demand, I don’t think it’s possible to have ramped that fast. We’re ramping really, really hard. Yields are great, the product’s shipping fantastically, it’s just getting sold out instantly,” said Huang. “I appreciate it very much, I just don’t think there’s a real problem to solve. It’s a phenomenon to observe. It’s just a phenomenon.”
NVIDIA will release its mid-range Ampere card, the GeForce RTX 3070, on October 29. How will that go?