Old Nvidia GPUs are being resurrected to cope with the RAM crisis — but one big chip maker seems determined that a memory shortage won't happen again | Tech Radar

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Old Nvidia GPUs are being resurrected to cope with the RAM crisis — but one big chip maker seems determined that a memory shortage won't happen again

Nvidia's RTX 3060 and 3050 are returning, apparently

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The Nvidia RTX 3060 and 3050 are apparently making a comeback

A graphics card maker in Asia has new models planned as budget alternatives, and this practice could spread to other regions

Meanwhile, we're hearing that SK Hynix plans to accelerate development of its memory chip production capacity and triple it by 2034

The RAM crisis appears to have another side-effect, namely bringing back old GPUs, but there's some more positive news for the future from one of the big memory chip makers.

Video Cardz noticed the resurrection of a couple of Nvidia graphics cards that aren't even from the past generation, but the one before that: the RTX 3050 and 3060, which are GPUs from 2020 that have been brought back by Manli, a graphics card maker that mainly supplies Asia.

The Manli RTX 3060 which has returned from the dead is a 12GB model, whereas the RTX 3050 has 6GB of VRAM and a 70W power envelope, meaning that it can run off the PCIe slot (with no need to be connected to the PSU).

Elsewhere, the future of RAM is looking rosier, with news from SK Hynix, one of the major three players in making memory chips, that it's ensuring that manufacturing capacity is being ramped up in a big way going into the next decade.

Chey Tae-won, the chairman of SK Group, said in an interview with Nikkei Asia (via Computer Base, as spotted by Tweak Town): "Since we're proceeding with the plan to expand as much as possible, our calculations show that our wafer capacity will double within five years. But honestly, once all these facilities are built, it won't just double, it will triple by around 2034."

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So that means by 2031, SK Hynix will have doubled its manufacturing capacity, and it'll only be a few years more until that's trebled, moving notably faster down the line. That said, this is a best-case scenario we're told, and those expectations could always slide.

This represents SK Hynix putting its foot down on the RAM production pedal in a big way. We're now looking at eight years for a trebling of manufacturing capacity for DRAM and NAND flash memory chips, whereas previously the timeline for this was 20 years. Yes – two whole decades.

This is a measure of how much RAM demand SK Hynix is expecting going forward – and that the current memory-hungry environment isn't going away. As we've been hearing recently, if anything, the AI boom is set to continue and gobble up even more RAM in the foreseeable future.

As for the Nvidia GPUs which are being brought back to life, this may be just in Asia for now, but it indicates that this could happen elsewhere, too. There have been previous rumors about the RTX 3060 12GB making a comeback, so here we're seeing some hard evidence that this is actually happening.

Are you wondering why it's happening? Well, both of these GPUs are back to serve as budget-friendly options in a time where current-gen GPU availability is becoming more problematic, and prices are rising. (Indeed, at the higher-end for Nvidia GPUs, price inflation has been getting quite nasty this year, and the fear is that it'll only worsen).

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 may question the wisdom of an affordable GPU that packs on the video RAM in this memory-starved climate, remember that this Nvidia card uses GDDR6 VRAM, not GDDR7 as seen in current-gen Blackwell GPUs, so it's a different kettle of fish in that respect. It theoretically allows for some extra breathing room to produce some more wallet-friendly graphics cards without tapping into precious GDDR7 resources.

Of course, we don't know how wide a scope this apparent revitalization of old Ampere GPUs might have, and it could be quite a limited affair. Time will tell.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for Tech Radar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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