Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I suspect giving them away is a bridge too far, however not rewarding capital for treating them as speculative investment vehicles might be a good start.
IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off
231–240 of 985 posts
Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because usually it's more efficient for companies to retire the hardware and put in new stuff. Meanwhile, my 10-15 year old server hardware keeps chugging along just fine in the rack in my garage.
Sample size of 1 though. It's like how I've had hard disks last a decade, but a 100 node Hadoop cluster had 3 die per week after a few years.
Spinning rust and fans are the outliers when it comes to longevity in compute hardware. I’ve had to replace a disk or two in my rack at home, but at the end of the day the CPUs, RAM, NICs, etc. all continue to tick along just fine.
When it comes to enterprise deployments, the lifecycle always revolves around price/performance. Why pay for old gear that sucks up power and runs 30% slower than the new hotness, after all!
But, here we are, hitting limits of transistor density. There’s a reason I still can’t get 13th or 14th gen poweredge boxes for the price I paid for my 12th gen ones years ago.
Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off
#233One thing we saw with the dot-com bust is how certain individuals were able to cash in on the failures, e.g., low cost hardware, domain names, etc. (NB. prices may exceed $2) Perhaps people are already thinking about they can cash in on the floor space and HVAC systems that will be left in the wake of failed "AI" hype
To be honest ai datacentres would be a rip and replace to get back to normal datacentre density, at least on the cooling and power systems. Maybe useful for some kind of manufacturing or industrial process.
Cheap compute would be a boon for science research.
Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off
#234> Krishna also referenced the depreciation of the AI chips inside data centers as another factor: "You've got to use it all in five years because at that point, you've got to throw it away and refill it," he said This doesn't seem correct to me, or at least is built on several shaky assumptions. One would have to 'refill' your hardware if: - AI accelerator cards all start dying around the 5 year mark, which is possib…
5 years is long, actually. This is not a GPU thing. It's standard for server hardware.
5 years is a long time for GPUs maybe but normal servers have 7 year lifespans in many cases fwiw.
These GPUs I assume basically have potential longevity issues due to the density, if you could cool it really really well I imagine no problem.
Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off
#235> Krishna also referenced the depreciation of the AI chips inside data centers as another factor: "You've got to use it all in five years because at that point, you've got to throw it away and refill it," he said This doesn't seem correct to me, or at least is built on several shaky assumptions. One would have to 'refill' your hardware if: - AI accelerator cards all start dying around the 5 year mark, which is possib…
It's just the same dynamic as old servers. They still work fine but power costs make them uneconomical compared to latest tech.
LambdaLabs is still making money off their Tesla V100s, A100s, and A6000s. The older ones are cheap enough to run some models and very cheap, so if that's all you need, that's what you'll pick.
The V100 was released in 2017, A6000 in 2020, A100 in 2021.
Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off
#236One thing we saw with the dot-com bust is how certain individuals were able to cash in on the failures, e.g., low cost hardware, domain names, etc. (NB. prices may exceed $2) Perhaps people are already thinking about they can cash in on the floor space and HVAC systems that will be left in the wake of failed "AI" hype
Can’t wait for all this cheap ddr5 memory and GPUs
Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off
#237Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off
#238> Krishna also referenced the depreciation of the AI chips inside data centers as another factor: "You've got to use it all in five years because at that point, you've got to throw it away and refill it," he said This doesn't seem correct to me, or at least is built on several shaky assumptions. One would have to 'refill' your hardware if: - AI accelerator cards all start dying around the 5 year mark, which is possib…
It’s not about assumptions on the hardware. It’s about the current demands for computation and expected growth of business needs. Since we have a couple years to measure against it should be extremely straightforward to predict. As such I have no reason to doubt the stated projections.
Networking gear was famously overbought. Enterprise hardware is tricky as there isn’t much of a resale market for this gear once all is said and done.
The only valid use case for all of this compute which could reasonably replace ai is btc mining. I’m uncertain if the increased mining capacity would harm the market or not.
Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off
#239I would add an addendum to this -- there is no way the announced spending on AI data centers will all come to fruition. I have no doubt that there will be a massive build-out of infrastructure, but it can't reach the levels that have been announced. The power requirements alone will stop that from happening.
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Hmm... "CEOs and teams" don't necessary do what's makes sense mathematically. Many, if not most of them, do whatever that sounds good to shareholders in their quarterly earnings call and ignore the reality or long term development.
If "CEOs and teams" are smart enough, they would not have overhired during 2021-2022 and then do layoffs. Who would be dumb enough to do that?
Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off
#240"It is 1958. IBM passes up the chance to buy a young, fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox is born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since. It is ten years later, the late '60s. Digital Equipment DEC and others invent the minicomputer. IBM dismisses the minicomputer as too small to do serious computing and, therefore, unimportant to their business. DEC grows to become a multi-hundred-million dollar corporation before IBM finally enters the minicomputer market. It is now ten years later, the late '70s. In 1977, Apple, a young fledgling company on the West Coast, invents the Apple II, the first personal computer as we know it today. IBM dismisses the personal computer as too small to do serious computing and unimportant to their business." - Steve Jobs [1][2][3]
Now, "IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off". IBM has not exactly had a stellar record at identifying the future.
[1] https://speakola.com/ideas/steve-jobs-1984-ad-launch-1983
[2] https://archive.org/details/1983-10-22-steve-jobs-keynote