The 20,000 is probably pretty close to accurate, so if the 16M number sold is accurate why has there been such an impact on the video card market? You can't reliably find 5850s, 5870s, 5970s, or 6990s in stock anywhere, and even 5830s are going. If we're only .1% of the market, it shouldn't have had that big of an effect. Does that mean there is like 50k G/hash in cards purchased recently and still waiting to come online?
It's possible, and I know I'm part of it since I bought 27 cards in the past week
It's possible, and I know I'm part of it since I bought 27 cards in the past week
Is the 20,000 miners or cards sold to miners? I personally have bought around 30 cards so far, other people who look at this as an investment are buying 5-10 without much hesitation. How many of the 16,000,000 cards are sitting in stores or in prebuilt computers waiting to be sold?
Most are sitting in gamers' PC's. They purchase the vast majority of all graphics cards.
The cards are also largely optimized for gaming; If they were optimized for OpenCL (besides it just being another feature) instead of gaming we'd be seeing double hash rates or better.