What does MSRP even mean?
With the increase in appraisal of crypto currencies GPU prices have climbed to 2-4x their MSRP. Some have blamed covid and the lockdown that forced people at home for increase in demand for home appliances; however the almost 1:1 correlation between historical prices of gpus and cryptos makes covid almost irrelevant.
In comparison, machine learning (or particularly, deep learning) only saturates the very high-end price range because it requires FP precision, which is a more niche requirement, where as a crypto GPU pow tries to leverage the whole GPU instructions set, therefore the full products range of the GPU market is appealing for mining.
No. The GPU market has been eaten by crypto mining and will never recover.
GPUs are stackable which means that your average miner buys at least 4 GPUs where-as your average consumer only needs 1 GPU most of the times
If the major cryptocurrencies switch to POS (like ETH), other crypto currencies will take it's hashing power, a much sharper price correction has to happen to cause a sudden GPU sell-off by miners.
Miners are fine switching mining equipment on and off depending on the reward ratio between electricity cost and cryptocurrency prices, they won't sell the hardware at the first dip.
The only GPUs at time of writing with reasonable prices are the integrated ones, and the laptops that ship with GPUs (in the mobile versions). If manufacturers want to re-open the GPU market to average users they have to offer integrated solutions that are more competitive against dedicated ones. Or design a different kind of GPU that is half-way between a dedicated and integrated; how? by thinking about tightly coupled CPUs and GPUs that are yet modular (and therefore swappable, but not stackable!).
