Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 985 posts

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#241

Post by matt-p »

acdha wrote: post #39
beachy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just the same dynamic as old servers. They still work fine but power costs make them uneconomical compared to latest tech.

It’s far more extreme: old servers are still okay on I/O, and memory latency, etc. won’t change that dramatically so you can still find productive uses for them. AI workloads are hyper-focused on a single type of work and, unlike most regular servers, a limiting factor in direct competition with other companies.

I mean you could use training GPUs for inference right? That would be use case number 1 for a 8 * a100 box in a couple of years. It can also be used for non IO limited things like folding proteins or other 'scientific' use cases. Push comes to shove im sure an old A100 will run crysis.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#243

Post by matt-p »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #175
beachy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just the same dynamic as old servers. They still work fine but power costs make them uneconomical compared to latest tech.

Eh, not exactly. If you don't run CPU at 70%+ the rest of the machine isn't that much more inefficient that model generation or two behind. It used to be that new server could use half power of the old one at idle but vendors figured out that servers also need proper power management a while ago and it is much better. Last few gens increase could be summed up to "low % increase in efficiency, with TDP, memory channel…

Definitely single thread performance and storage are the main reasons not to use an old server. A 6 year old server didn't have nvme drives, so SATA SSD at best. That's a major slow down if disk is important.

Aside from that there's no reason to not use a dual socket server from 5 years ago instead of a single socket server of today. Power and reliability maybe not as good.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#244

Post by scj »

alphabetag675 wrote: post #233
matt-p wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It'll likely be used to mine bitcoin instead.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#247

Post by dangus »

zeckalpha wrote: post #242

Reminds me of all the dark fiber laid in the 1990s before DWDM made much of the laid fiber redundant. If there is an AI bust, we will have a glut of surplus hardware.

The problem is that the laid fiber can be useful for years while data center hardware degrades and becomes obsolete fast.

It could be a massive e-waste crisis.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#248

Post by oofbey »

zeckalpha wrote: post #242

Reminds me of all the dark fiber laid in the 1990s before DWDM made much of the laid fiber redundant. If there is an AI bust, we will have a glut of surplus hardware.

For the analogy to fiber & DWDM to hold, we'd need some algorithmic breakthrough that makes current GPUs much faster / more efficient at running AI models. Something that makes the existing investment in hardware unneeded, even though the projected demand is real and continues to grow. IMNSHO that's not going to happen here. The foreseeable efficiency innovations are generally around reduced precision, which almost always require newer hardware to take advantage of. Impossible to rule out brilliant innovation, but I doubt it will happen like that.

And of course we might see an economic bubble burst for other reasons. That's possible again even if the demand continues to go up.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#249

Post by prodigycorp »

mathattack wrote: post #245

Interesting to hear this from IBM, especially after years of shilling Watson and moving from being a growth business to the technology audit and share buyback model.

also because the market (correctly) rewards ibm for nothing, so if they’re going to sit around twiddling their fingers, they may as well do it in a capex-lite way.

Re: IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

#250

Post by itake »

mathattack wrote: post #245

Interesting to hear this from IBM, especially after years of shilling Watson and moving from being a growth business to the technology audit and share buyback model.

imho, IBM's quant computing says they are still hungry for growth.

Apple and google still do share buy backs and dividends, despite launching new businesses

https://www.ibm.com/roadmaps/

Post reply on HN