‘Miners’ vs ‘Gamers’

6

October

2021

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GPU shortages are not new, as many graphics cards like the top-end NVIDIA cards often immediately sell out. However, due to the extremely fast increasing cryptocurrency prices, demand for PC components has skyrocketed with the rise of cryptocurrency mining. As a result, graphics cards are going to disappear even faster and this could be a disaster for anyone looking to buy a graphics card for gaming. And it’s not only graphics cards, good processors (CPUs) are also very hard to buy at the moment as they can also be used to make a profit mining crypto. Most of the (financial) gains are made with GPUs, however. To make this even worse, prices of many components have more than doubled and there is no sign of this slowing down (Esteves, 2018; Walton, 2021).

Because of the problems I mentioned above, gamers now have to fight both bots and miners when they want to buy components for their PC. You could thus say that crypto and the technologies related to it are giving normal PC-gamers a hard time enjoying the things they like to do: play video games. My own experience with this problem, as someone who likes to play video games in his free time, is that you either have to pay a very high price or have to get extremely lucky. I have bought my current GPU 3 years ago for about €350 and at the moment it is going for about €700. Usually, I would be tempted to sell and make a profit. The problem, however, is that it will probably be near impossible to buy an upgrade, leaving me with no GPU at all (Esteves, 2018; Walton, 2021).  

It is expected that crypto prices and effort needed to mine them will become balanced again. When that will happen and what price will come out of it is hard to guess, but for gamers the future is not looking very bright. Overall, it is difficult to find a solution to this problem. NVDIA could, for example, introduce buying limits of X products per person, but I assume this would be extremely complex and costly to implement for them and in the end NVIDIA’s main goal is to make money (Walton, 2021).

References:
Esteves, R. (2018, April 14). Bitcoin Mining Pressures Hardware Prices. Retrieved 6 October 2021, from https://www.newsbtc.com/all/bitcoin-mining-pressures-hardware-prices/

Walton, J. (2021, January 4). GPU Shortages Will Worsen Thanks to Coin Miners. Retrieved 6 October 2021, from https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-shortages-worsen-cryptocurrency-coin-miners-ethereum

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Global silicon chip shortage explained

1

October

2021

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It is very likely that you have already heard about this problem, there was and is a global shortage of silicon chips. What you probably haven’t thought about is, why this problem occurred and how much affect it had on the world and businesses. Recently, car manufacturer Opel had to close one of its factories due to a chip shortage. Earlier this year, Ford, Audi and General Motors also had to temporarily cease production (Tweakers, n.d.).

Many products these days rely on semiconductors (computer chips) and at the moment there are just not enough computer chips to meet the industry demand. This causes many popular products to be unavailable for purchase. A very popular example is that it has become incredibly difficult to purchase a PlayStation 5 (PS5) game console (Baraniuk, 2021). This does not only impact the sales, but it also opens up the question for businesses on how to deal with this issue. So, what has actually been happening?

This problem has been developing for years, not months. Well before the pandemic, the rise of 5G pressured the semiconductor industry by increasing demands. Also, the ban that the United States (US) put on the sale of semiconductors and other technology to Huawei, increased the pressure of the industry as chip makers outside the US were flooded with order from the Chinese firm (Keane, n.d.). There has also been a boom in demand for lower cost chips, which are embedded in a growing variety of consumer products (Baraniuk, 2021).

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, there started to be fluctuations in demand which led to stockpiling and advance ordering by tech companies. During the pandemic, people needed to work from home and needed laptops, tablets, webcams and other products to facilitate that need. The pandemic was therefor definitely not the sole cause of the shortage, it however was the last drop in the bucket. According to Intel and IBM, they predict that the chip shortage could last two years. Chip makers have ramped up production and are building new facilities to respond to the sustained demand, however it will take time (Baraniuk, 2021; IEEE Spectrum, 2021).

Now that it is clear how the global silicon chip shortage came into existence, the question that remains is. Could this have been foreseen? Could companies have predicted that this would happen based on the data that they had? In my honest opinion, this could have been predicted, but only if there had been an integrated supply chain between all the chipmakers and all the tech firms that purchase from them. Leading up to and during the pandemic there were lots of releases of new tech products. For example, the PS5 that had been mentioned earlier. But there was more, at the same time the new Xbox Series X was released, as well as new GPU cards by Nvidia. Also, 5G and electric cars were being introduced in the world, but also newer models of regular cars require chips. If there was a truly global integrated supply chain between all these stakeholders, someone would have foreseen this shortage before it was going to happen. So maybe for businesses that operate in the semiconductor industry, they should consider sharing relevant information to prevent such a shortage in the future, since no one can capitalize on the shortage.

References

Baraniuk, C. (2021). Why Is There a Chip shortage? BBC News. [online] 26 Aug. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58230388.

IEEE Spectrum. (2021). How and When the Chip Shortage Will End, in 4 Charts. [online] Available at: https://spectrum.ieee.org/chip-shortage.

Keane, S. (n.d.). Huawei ban timeline: Detained CFO makes deal with US Justice Department. [online] CNET. Available at: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/huawei-ban-timeline-detained-cfo-makes-deal-with-us-justice-department/.

Tweakers. (n.d.). Opel zet autoproductie in Duitse fabriek stop vanwege chiptekorten. [online] Available at: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/187574/opel-zet-autoproductie-in-duitse-fabriek-stop-vanwege-chiptekorten.html [Accessed 1 Oct. 2021].

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Consumer Data: Currency of the Future. 5/5 (1)

10

October

2016

Google Home – the always-listening connected speaker. Welcome to the next generation of consumer data collection. At Alphabet’s hardware launch event last week, the company unveiled it’s answer to Amazon’s Echo: a wireless speaker with a set of microphones built into it, allowing the neat little device to continuously listen to you. A physical “mute” button on top let’s you tell it to stop listening, and actually, that’s the most interesting thing about it – Google Home listens to you by default.

Our personal devices are becoming more personal than we ever could have imagined, and Google Home is a clear testament to that. The company has positioned itself right at the heart of consumer data, with access to unlimited, highly personal information. It’s always listening, always learning. TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas put it perfectly, “in other words, your daily business is Google’s business.”

Personal spaces like your home and office are being turned into gold mines of consumer data, all fueling Google’s AI technology. That’s the nature of machine learning, it needs information to become useful. In order to give you suggestions on where you might like to eat or what the traffic’s like on your commute to work, it needs to continuously harvest your personal information, preferences etc. and learn, infinitely. It sounds a little paranoid, but that’s the raw truth. When I first heard about Google Home (and the rest of Google’s hardware line), I was pretty excited, to be honest. Besides its good-looks, it seemed Google was in a better position than anyone to pull off an AI-powered home device, which added huge appeal. Having had a bit of a think, however, I’m somewhat nervous about giving them total unobstructed access to the most personal aspects of my life…

AI is becoming an integral part of our lives, the more we find utility in it, and businesses like Google are tapping directly into that in order to profit in a multitude of ways. Google Home offers direct access to our most personal spaces, and it’s difficult to deny that it feels a little invasive – but then that depends on your perspective, I guess. In any case, it seems we may have come to a crossroads; we need to ask ourselves if we’re ready to give up that access and, perhaps more to the point, are we to gain or to lose from doing so?

It seems pretty clear to me: consumer data is the currency of the future, and Google is going to be absolutely swimming in it.

Sources:

  • https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/04/say-hello-to-google-home/
  • https://madeby.google.com/home/
  • https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/05/not-ok-google/
  • http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/18/technology/google-to-introduce-its-voice-activated-home-device.html?_r=1
  • https://thescene.com/watch/wired/google-is-changing-its-gadget-game?source=player_scene_logo

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#madebygoogle

9

October

2016

5/5 (5) Google and Apple have been rivals in the mobile operating system market since the inception of superphones. Partnering with manufacturers and allowing them to customize their version of Android seemed to be the prevailing strategy for Google with the exception of the Nexus program. In order to set a benchmark on how Google sees the future of Android, it used to be that once a year Google would partner with a manufacturer to release a phone which was running “Vanilla Android”. No customizations nor bloatware, just a clean build of Android. Partnering manufacturers would change, some even releasing phones in several consecutive years, but the they would be solely responsible for the hardware, while Google would provide the software.

Things started to change in 2015 though. Google released the Pixel C, a unique tablet that was made entirely by Google. No known hardware manufacturer was advertised and it seemed to show that Google had a different plan for the Nexus program. As this device was made entirely by Google, the company took an approach similar to Apple, where they designed and developed the hardware and the software to run together for the best possible user experience.

This year, Google launched their own phone, Wi-Fi router, virtual reality headset and home assistant. All of these devices are #madebygoogle incorporating both software and hardware in order to provide a seamless experience for end users. Suddenly, they became a hardware company.

This causes a significant disruption for all their partners who are currently selling mobile devices that run on Android. Pixel, Pixel XL and Pixel C represent the Google vision of Android, hardware and software. They are no longer solely partnering with manufacturers; they are also actively competing with them.

As the #madebygoogle products are priced at a premium, there should be less competition in terms of the majority of the Android market, but this does not mean that users who used to favor other high-end handsets will rely on the offerings of partners. There will be Android purists who will purchase hardware made only by Google as relying on partners means, slower updates, limited feature sets, and sometimes even restricted access to bleeding edge features, such as Google Assistant which is currently exclusive to the Pixel and the Allo app.

References:

https://madeby.google.com/

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/5/13167230/walt-mossberg-google-pixel-phone-industry-shake-up

http://www.theverge.com/a/google-pixel-phone-new-hardware-interview-2016

http://mashable.com/2016/10/06/google-assistant-not-in-android-nougat-7-1/

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