After the recent surge in cryptocurrency prices, speculation arose on whether it would impact the price of GPUs, but it turned out to be a case of “CPU shortage instead.”
The said CPU in question is the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, the top model of the Ryzen 7000 series. This is due to it being a new-gen CPU that features AVX512 instruction set for vector processing, making it more efficient for mining certain types of cryptocurrencies (like Qubic/QBIC) compared to using NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs.
Interestingly, the AVX instruction set was developed by Intel, but they have stopped using it since the Alder Lake CPUs (12th Gen) onwards. Hence, if one desires a CPU with AVX512 capabilities, AMD CPUs are currently the only option.
The fact that the Ryzen 9 7950X CPU yields higher profits when mining compared to the GeForce RTX 4090 (considering performance, chip prices, and power costs) has resulted in a heavy scarcity of the 7950X CPUs. It remains to be seen how this scarcity will affect the upcoming Zen 5 CPU lineup expected to debut this year.
Source: Wccftech, ExtremeTech
TLDR: Cryptocurrency price hikes caused a shift towards AMD Ryzen CPUs for mining due to their superior AVX512 capabilities over NVIDIA GPUs, leading to a shortage of AMD Ryzen 9 7950X CPUs in the market.
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