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huragok 12 hours ago

If I had the capital I’d make an household inference appliance.

No peripherals except Ethernet, integrated compute (cpu+gpu+mem) and secondary storage (+mobo, psu). No accoutrements, just the minimum amount of hardware to run a model as a utility.

Even the appliance faceplate would be a display showing stats like an old HiFi stereo.

Edit: something like a series of modules consisting of a RISC-V CPU + Vortex GPGPU + memory

swader999 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It could heat your home in the winter and your pool in the summer.

catlikesshrimp 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Is warming a pool in the summer real where you live?

surfaceofthesun 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes. Solar thermal heaters on the roof are common in Florida and other parts of the south. Some people also use heat recovery devices attached to the AC condenser. Further north I've only seen natural gas heating (e.g. in very rich NYC exurbs). The amount of shade over the pool has a big effect.

jdc0589 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm keeping an eye on Tenstorrent for this. Pricing seems like its going to end up being in between a super memory dense unified memory platform, and a purpose built GPU.

Definitely on the edge of what would make sense at home, but its interesting.

Aperocky 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You're describing the mac mini/studio with some facelift.

boredatoms 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah but like running linux hopefully

throw1234567891 8 hours ago | parent [-]

so you have invent unified memory for linux first because that’s the limitation today

Alpha3031 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Fairly sure most iGPUs these days are zero-copy and can dynamically allocate memory so what does "unified memory" mean to you exactly? A wider bus would be nice but it's not exactly a groundbreaking new invention.

throw1234567891 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I was actually pretty far off:

> Unified memory in Linux creates a single address space accessible to both the CPU and GPU, eliminating the need to manually copy data between system RAM and video memory. It is enabled via NVIDIA's CUDA, AMD's ROCm/HIP, or generic kernel-level Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM).

So it does exist and is available for platforms that matter.

vkazanov 7 hours ago | parent [-]

It is interesting how apple claimed that "unified memory" is something special, and ppl believed them.

Intel and AMD had been doing this for years already, and had linux support for it from day 1.

throw1234567891 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Cool. Apple was the only one who managed to ship a consumer device with UMA and RDMA support. 2TB VRAM max over RDMA.

vkazanov 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the REALLY cool thing about apple's shared memory implementation is the ultra-wide memory bus.

Otherwise, AMD is quite close to what Apple has, and Strix Halo is honestly incredible.

Not sure what RDMA brings to the table.

throw1234567891 4 hours ago | parent [-]

RDMA increases the inference performance by a significant percentage across devices connected via Thunderbolt 5.4x512 is like a 2TB machine.

curt15 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or just buy a MI300A server like https://www.servethehome.com/gigabyte-g383-r80-aap1-amd-inst...

throw1234567891 6 hours ago | parent [-]

"Just". And then GPUs, and RAM? And cooling? Will you really appreciate it when sitting right next to it?

vardump 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Raspberry Pi and other SBCs, Android phones and practically all of the embedded devices with a display and microprocessor.

All have unified memory. Linux runs just fine on all of those.

throw1234567891 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Dude, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48858095

vardump 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Ah ok. I replied to ~45 minutes stale page.

huragok 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Absolutely, but not under the control of Apple.

dracotomes 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't that what what George Hotz is doing over at tiny? https://tinycorp.myshopify.com/

huragok 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, but for inference. 45k is so far out of the budget of a professional unless you earn ridiculous money and have no dependents.

gizajob 6 hours ago | parent [-]

A professional AI engineer? Earning hundreds of thoundands of dollars a year?

klardotsh 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

Who lives on one of the coasts where that job likely requires them to be, where rent is $3-5k and mortgages within spitting distance of that, sure.

Tade0 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think the closest to that in existence is the LLM ASIC designed by Taalas:

https://taalas.com/products/

Unfortunately their chatbot, while amazingly fast, doesn't know anything about the company running it.

Anyway I wouldn't mind an ASIC running a diffusion language model locally. Even if eventually it would become dated. Beats outsourcing all that to a company that's running on VC money which in the future might either perish or worse - dominate the market and charge whatever they wish.

auston 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Here you go: https://www.truffle.net/

grosswait 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I lasted about 25 seconds on that site. Way too much friction for me to endure just trying to figure out what it is

wtetzner 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, I don't know who thought that website was a good idea.

joshmn 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Login to order"

That's a new one.

tristor 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I feel like this is some sort of satire? There's no actual information or substance to anything on any page of that site.

permalac 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is that the nvidia spark?

imp0cat 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, and a lot of others.

A bit too expensive for a home appliance though, isn't it?

not-kinsale-joe 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sounds like reinventing the home server.

not-a-llm 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

the pheriphels support, or the appliance faceplate is tens of dollars, that not where you make the saving

95% of the price is going to be in GPU+CPU+RAM

robotswantdata 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

build a Xeon / epyc 4u server. 12 channel ram.

musha68k 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, just a big cool Cerebras wafer for the closet please.

throw1234567891 8 hours ago | parent [-]

A single wafer comes with 44GB RAM, the reason why Cerebras is so interesting is because the architecture scales up to 1.6PB RAM.

musha68k 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Central heating / thinking.

kotberg 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]