- The Nvidia RTX 3060 and 3050 are apparently making a comeback
- A graphics card manufacturer in Asia has new models planned as budget alternatives, and this practice may spread to other regions
- Meanwhile, we hear that SK Hynix plans to accelerate the development of its memory chip production capacity and triple it by 2034
The RAM crisis seems to have another side effect of bringing back old GPUs, but there is some more positive news for the future from one of the major memory chip makers.
VideoCardz noted the resurrection of a pair of Nvidia graphics cards that aren’t even from the latest generation, but the one before: the RTX 3050 and 3060, which are 2020 GPUs that have been brought back by Manli, a graphics card manufacturer that mainly supplies Asia.
Back from the dead, the Manli RTX 3060 is a 12GB model, whereas the RTX 3050 has 6GB of VRAM and a 70W power envelope, meaning it can run from the PCIe slot (without the need to be connected to the PSU).
Elsewhere, the future of RAM looks brighter, with news from SK Hynix, one of the big three players in memory chip manufacturing, that it is ensuring production capacity will increase significantly in the next decade.
Chey Tae-won, the chairman of SK Group, said in an interview with Nikkei Asia (via ComputerBase, as seen by TweakTown): “As we continue with the plan to expand as much as possible, our calculations show that our wafer capacity will double within five years. But frankly, when all these facilities are built, it will not only triple by about double, it will triple by about double.”
So that means by 2031, SK Hynix will have doubled its production capacity, and it will only be a few more years until it’s tripled, moving significantly faster down the line. That said, this is a best-case scenario, we’re told, and those expectations can always slip.
Analysis: a remarkable acceleration
This represents SK Hynix putting its foot down on the RAM production pedal in a big way. We are now looking at eight years for a tripling of production capacity for DRAM and NAND flash memory chips, whereas the timeline previously was 20 years. Yes – two whole decades.
This is a measure of how much RAM demand SK Hynix expects going forward – and that the current memory-hungry environment will not disappear. As we’ve heard recently, if anything, the AI boom is set to continue and gobble up even more RAM for the foreseeable future.
As for the Nvidia GPUs being brought back to life, this may only be in Asia for now, but it does indicate that this could happen elsewhere as well. There have been rumors in the past that the RTX 3060 12GB is making a comeback, so here we see some hard evidence that this is actually happening.
Are you wondering why this happens? Well, both of these GPUs are back to serve as budget-friendly options at a time when availability of current generation GPUs is becoming more problematic and prices are rising. (In fact, at the higher end for Nvidia GPUs, price inflation has gotten pretty ugly this year, and the fear is that it’s only going to get worse).
The RTX 3060 was a popular offering for a long time, and the 12GB variant proved tempting for gamers who didn’t want to be shortchanged by newer Nvidia budget graphics cards that only served up 8GB of VRAM. While you might question the wisdom of an affordable GPU packing on video RAM in this memory-starved climate, remember that this Nvidia card uses GDDR6 VRAM, not GDDR7 as seen in the current generation of Blackwell GPUs, so it’s a different kettle of fish in that regard. That theoretically allows for some extra breathing room to produce some more wallet-friendly graphics cards without using up precious GDDR7 resources.
Of course, we don’t know how widespread this apparent revitalization of old Ampere GPUs might be, and it might be a fairly limited affair. Time will tell.
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