As per one recent report posted by the Chinese publication IThome, Nvidia could be retiring the GeForce RTX 2070, RTX 2070 Super, RTX 2080 Super, and RTX 2080 Ti Turing cards. This is apparently being done for the sake of the new Nvidia Ampere GPUs.
The high-end models make up the top of the product stack and range wildly in price. The 2080 Ti reaches north of $1,200 USD, with the other cards ranging from $500-$800 depending on the card and stock levels. Nvidia pulling the plug on these cards suggests that the new Ampere GPUs will have replacement options. And it’s likely that they could be priced similarly, although on the higher end.
There will allegedly not only be a stoppage in production, but Nvidia will stop supplying other vendors, AIBs and more with reference designs or chips for their own versions of the cards.
The new cards are due with the Nvidia Ampere GPUs will launch in Q3 2020, which will include the GeForce RTX 3080, 3080 Ti and GeForce RTX 3090 lines.
So What Happens Now?
There is more bad news as well. There has been a recent increase in the mining for GPUs in recent months as more and more users return to GPU mining for cryptocurrencies. This problem was originally somewhat alleviated by increased production and the proliferation of ASIC mining, but COVID-19 causing production problems and more interest in cryptocurrencies has brought this nonsense back again. Expect to pay much more than you should for 2000-series GPUs for the next little bit.
There could also be a higher price paid for lesser-end cards. According to a report by My drivers, even the mainstream GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER & the GeForce RTX 2060 cards could be affected. This may come about due to AIBs raising prices so they make more money off of increased demand.
There could be another issue contributes to supply problems as well. TSMC may be running out of manufactured parts for certain GPUs. TSMC manufactures the Turing silicon for Nvidia on the 12nm FinFET process node. But with the number of products TSMC makes for other companies like AMD, Apple and more on that node, it could be a supply problem on their end as well. So it seems possible that Nvidia ended production to ease that burden.
What will be interesting is how this change affects the prices of Nvidia Ampere GPUs at launch. When the Turing GPUs launched, prices were inflated like mad, due to them having to compete with the older GPUs still in stock. AIBs set the newer GPUs higher than MSRP to encourage users to buy out older stocks. And with this pre-launch shift to the newer GPUs, AIBs could be able to price the 3000-series cards closer to MSRP.
