this all kind of makes me giggle. I know when bionic put out gpu stuff for crunching numbers there was a slight increase in card sales.... But I can't imagine there has ever been a increase in sales like this. its completely insane how many vid cards have been purchased just because of bitcoins in the past few weeks... should of got stock in these manufacturers
A simple estimate of the bitcoin community puts miners in the roughly 10-20,000 range. New card sales are likely less but even assuming an optimistic estimate, we'll say 20,000.
In the first 9 months after the 5xxx series was released, AMD sold 16million 5xxx chips. 20,000 / 16million = .1% Bitcoin is a drop in the bucket at the moment. I'm glad people are being optimistic about bitcoin, that's what it needs, but really let's keep things in perspective.