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TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

theregister.com

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Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#91

Post by [deleted] »

trough wrote: post #68
mikrl wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>given the issues with the far-right in Saxony What does that have to do with anything? California has plenty of neonazis itself. The western world in general has no lack of far right extremists.

There are some concerns that the internationally recognized image of Saxony as an extremely xenophobic region will deter international talent. The main problem isn’t staffing the plant with human assembly and packaging drones but having engineers and IT join permanently after production starts. Rural saxony is not a place where you want to live if even your last name isn’t deemed ‘white’ or ‘German’ enough. And after…

[deleted]

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#92

Post by wing-_-nuts »

ethbr1 wrote: post #86
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno man, stuff like google collab is ubiquitous for students these days. I asked about building a pc on the AI/ML subs on reddit and people basically and the default advice was that few did that these days, and they're right, compute prices have been really low until recently even if you decided to go with premium offerings.

If you don't have a house with space that you expect to stay in for awhile, laptop+cloud is too compelling to make anything else worth it. If you start having physical space guarantees, then the calculus changes...

Last time I did the math, by the time I spent 4090 money on compute, I could have been done with a PHD. Now, if all you need is a 3060? Yeah you could probably make that work, but you wouldn't be doing LLM inference even quantized

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#93

Post by jpdus »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #92
ethbr1 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't have a house with space that you expect to stay in for awhile, laptop+cloud is too compelling to make anything else worth it. If you start having physical space guarantees, then the calculus changes...

Last time I did the math, by the time I spent 4090 money on compute, I could have been done with a PHD. Now, if all you need is a 3060? Yeah you could probably make that work, but you wouldn't be doing LLM inference even quantized

Either you only use the GPU sporadically or your math is very different from Tim Dettmers` [1]:

"The break-even point for a desktop vs a cloud instance at 15% utilization (you use the cloud instance 15% of time during the day), would be about 300 days ($2,311 vs $2,270):"

And that was written before the current GPU crunch and assumes availability in the cloud, which currently is not a given at all.

[1] https://timdettmers.com/2023/01/30/which-gpu-for-deep-learni...

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#94

Post by redeeman »

mschuster91 wrote: post #80
ARandomerDude wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or far-left ones, for that matter.

Far left ones don't go and shout "Ausländer raus" while marching in the thousands, which was a common occurrence during the high days of the weekly "Pegida" nazi marches in Dresden. Nor do they randomly beat up random people (not to mention protesters) that are just standing around [1]. [1] https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2018-10/recht...

[flagged]

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#95

Post by mikrl »

mschuster91 wrote: post #79
mikrl wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>given the issues with the far-right in Saxony What does that have to do with anything? California has plenty of neonazis itself. The western world in general has no lack of far right extremists.

Because discrimination is a common cause that makes people leave, most notably in Eastern Germany [1]. [1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/fachkraeftemangel-bloss-ni...

How are the bordering regions of Czechia and Poland?

Do they have the same issues?

I assume the open border facilitates travel somewhat.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#96

Post by guiambros »

cinntaile wrote: post #49
Roark66 wrote: post #21

I'd bet $50 in 18 months "the crunch" will still be in full swing (and Raspberry Pi will still be "bringing huge volumes to the market any week now"). There is no way in hell all these expensive fabs will pay for themselves if chips are too cheap. So no one (especially not TSMC) will risk oversupply by building too many fabs.

RPi's are freely available nowadays. https://rpilocator.com/

More available than before, yes. But still heavily constrained. In the US, there's no CM4 anywhere, and spotty availability of RPi4.

CM4s are still being sold for hundreds of dollars on eBay.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#97

Post by hef19898 »

trashtester wrote: post #89
hef19898 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't have to be an exact copy so, but yes design might be tricky. I assume solvable so, at least in a primitive and workable way. Machining, to be honest, beside size of the parts themselves, is something you can do in some reasonably well equipped maker space. And for size, CNC machines are readily available on the used market. And those are light years ahead of anything the Manhatten project had. Or Apollo for t…

From my undertanding, Fat Man requires a very precise design to focus the shock wave properly, or the bomb will never detonate properly. This design is quite non-trivial even today. It took several of the brightest minds of all time to get it just right back then (like von Neumann). Even with modern tools, you still need a team of quite capable engineers/scientists to pull something like that off, even if you do have…

Totally agree, the science / design part of it is still not trivial. Also I know next to nothing about it.

The machining bit so, uaing proper machinery, is easy. And the necessary engineers and technicians readily available.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#98

Post by qwytw »

trough wrote: post #68
mikrl wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>given the issues with the far-right in Saxony What does that have to do with anything? California has plenty of neonazis itself. The western world in general has no lack of far right extremists.

There are some concerns that the internationally recognized image of Saxony as an extremely xenophobic region will deter international talent. The main problem isn’t staffing the plant with human assembly and packaging drones but having engineers and IT join permanently after production starts. Rural saxony is not a place where you want to live if even your last name isn’t deemed ‘white’ or ‘German’ enough. And after…

> Saxony as an extremely xenophobic region

That seems like a 'slight' overstatement. Saxony is also full of crypto-communists (third highest polling state for Linke)...

> The main problem isn’t staffing the plant with human assembly and packaging

So why on earth are these companies building they are fabs there instead of some other place in Germany? I mean they can't be that stupid to not understand all of this?

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#99

Post by harshitaneja »

Miraste wrote: post #77
sangnoir wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Raspberry Pi has lost its place as the affordable hobbyist board I keep hearing this - but I've seen no evidence of any successor board. Which board would you say is now the go-to board for hobbyists?

There isn't one, that's what's so annoying. There are a lot of Pi-likes, but nothing with the same level of support and enthusiasm the Pi used to have. The community has just withered.

It's incredibly sad. I was in the hobbyist community as a younger teen since the beginning of pi till 2016-17. When I stopped at that time ESP8266 had just so much potential as the cheap microcontroller with wifi and RPi Zero W as the cheap microcontroller with wifi as well. The development environment had improved so much over the years and things seemed great. The alternative pi clones also were building their own identity and figuring out their software. Over the years I felt guilty for not experimenting given that Rpi4 had 8 gigs of ram! and surely the competition would be better. I bought a bunch of Zeros, ESPs and 4s when I couldn't find other alternatives much but surely that was because I was out of the community and didn't know what to buy. And surely there would have been ESP alternative in all these years with lower power alternatives now that IOT is going to be a bigger thing finally. Alas, last year I came back to the hobbyist scene finally! Excited! And it was all a major disappointment. All my favourite hobbyist stores in my country had shut down or increased prices for basically everything by a huge margin. It all seemed more polished but so much more void of the vibrancy of the earlier scene. All the experimental boards sort of failing. And I can't even buy the boards anymore. Thankfully I could retrieve all the boards I had bought in past so didn't have to chase boards in flash sales as everyone else I knew had to. But it's so sad.

Re: TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

#100

Post by sbbq »

Everyone is buying up H100's (and A100's if they can't find H100's). Sure, in 18 month people may lose interest in buying H100's but then there will already be the next Nvidia model everyone wants to buy to get ahead of the competition in terms of compute capabilities.
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