Are there better paths you would suggest? Any hardware people have reported better luck with?

Opt if you ignore that both gas furnaces and heat pumps are more efficient than resistive loads.

Seasonality in git commit frequency

You mean 1.083 tons of refrigeration

> In sane units: 3.8 kW

5.1 Horsepower

How many football fields of power?

The choice of BTU/hr was firmly tongue in cheek for our American friends.

Matching AC would only need 1/4 the power, right? If you don't already have a method to remove heat.

Just air freight them from 60 degrees North to 60 degrees South and vice verse every 6 months.

Well, get a heat pump with a good COP of 3 or more, and you won't need quite as much power ;)

That's about the era my company was an IBM reseller. Once I was kneeling behind 8x1U starting up and all the fans went to max speed for 3 seconds. Never put rackmount hardware in a room that is near anything living.

Get an AS400. Those were actually expected to be installed in an office, rather than a server room. Might still be perceived as loud at home, but won't be deafening and probably not louder than some gaming rigs.

I can’t speak to the Tesla stuff but I run an Epyc 7713 with a single 3090 and creatively splitting the model between GPU/8 channels of DDR4 I can do about 9 tokens per second on a q4 quant.

Tesla doesnt support 4 bit float.

Off topic, but I bought my (still in active use) 980ti literally 9 years ago for that price. I know, I know, inflation and stuff, but I really expected more than 50% bang for my buck after 9 whole years…

> Sure, datacenters will get rid of the hardware - but only because it's no longer commercially profitable run them, presumably because compute demands have eclipsed their abilities.

I think the existence of a pretty large secondary market for enterprise servers and such kind of shows that this won't be the case.

Sure, if you're AWS and what you're selling _is_ raw compute, then couple generation old hardware may not be sufficiently profitable for you anymore... but there are a lot of other places that hardware could be applied to with different requirements or higher margins where it may still be.

Even if they're only running models a generation or two out of date, there are a lot of use cases today, with today's models, that will continue to work fine going forward.

And that's assuming it doesn't get replaced for some other reason that only applies when you're trying to sell compute at scale. A small uptick in the failure rate may make a big dent at OpenAI but not for a company that's only running 8 cards in a rack somewhere and has a few spares on hand. A small increase in energy efficiency might offset the capital outlay to upgrade at OpenAI, but not for the company that's only running 8 cards.

I think there's still plenty of room in the market in places where running inference "at cost" would be profitable that are largely untapped right now because we haven't had a bunch of this hardware hit the market at a lower cost yet.

I have around a thousand broadwell cores in 4 socket systems that I got for ~nothing from these sorts of sources... pretty useful. (I mean, I guess literally nothing since I extracted the storage backplanes and sold them for more than the systems cost me). I try to run tasks in low power costs hours on zen3/4 unless it's gonna take weeks just running on those, and if it will I crank up the rest of the cores.

And 40 P40 GPUs that cost very little, which are a bit slow but with 24gb per gpu they're pretty useful for memory bandwidth bound tasks (and not horribly noncompetitive in terms of watts per TB/s).

Given highly variable time of day power it's also pretty useful to just get 2x the computing power (at low cost) and just run it during the low power cost periods.

So I think datacenter scrap is pretty useful.

It's interesting to think about scenarios where that hardware would get used only part of the time, like say when the sun is shining and/or when dwelling heat is needed. The biggest sticking point would seem to be all of the capex for connecting them to do something useful. It's a shame that PLX switch chips are so expensive.

The 5050 doesn't support 32-bit PsyX. So a bunch of games would be missing a ton of stuff. You'd still need the 980 running with it for older PhyX games because nVidia.

There is also a community of users known for not making sane financial decisions and keeping older technologies working in their basements.

The servers may well be worthless (or at least worth a lot less), but that's pretty much true for a long time. Not many people want to run on 10 year old servers (although I pay $30/month for a dedicated server that's dual Xeon L5640 or something like that, which is about 15 years old).

The servers will be replaced, the networking equipment will be replaced. The building will still be useful, the fiber that was pulled to internet exchanges/etc will still be useful, the wiring to the electric utility will still be useful (although I've certainly heard stories of datacenters where much of the floor space is unusable, because power density of racks has increased and the power distribution is maxed out)

If it is all a waste and a bubble, I wonder what the long term impact will be of the infrastructure upgrades around these dcs. A lot of new HV wires and substations are being built out. Cities are expanding around clusters of dcs. Are they setting themselves up for a new rust belt?

Sure, but what about the collective investment in smartphones, digital cameras, laptops, even cars. Not much modern technology is useful and practical after 10 years, let alone 20. AI is probably moving a little faster than normal, but technology depreciation is not limited to AI.

If a coal powered electric plant it next to the data-center you might be able to get electric cheap enough to keep it going.

Datacenters could go into the business of making personal PC's or workstations using the older NVIDIA cards and sell them.

They probably are right, but a counter argument could be how people thought going to the moon was pointless and insanely expensive, but the technology to put stuff in space and have GPS and comms satellites probably paid that back 100x

This isn’t my original take but if it results in more power buildout, especially restarting nuclear in the US, that’s an investment that would have staying power.

Utterly? Moores law per power requirement is dead, lower power units can run electric heating for small towns!

No it's not slow - a single NAND chip in SSDs offers >1GB of bandwidth - inside the chip there are 100+ wafers actually holding the data, but in SSDs only one of them is active when reading/writing.

You could probably make special NAND chips where all of them can be active at the same time, which means you could get 100GB+ bandwidth out of a single chip.

This would be useless for data storage scenarios, but very useful when you have huge amounts of static data you need to read quickly.

> as much power consumption as 10 mid-sized cars cruising at 50 mph

Imperial units are so weird

What about https://www.cerebras.ai/system?