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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#91

Post by kgeist »

barrkel wrote: post #15

I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time…

>we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute.

I thought the trend is the opposite direction, with RTX 5x series converging with server atchitectures (Blackwell-based such as RTX 6000 Pro+). Just less VRAM and fewer tensor cores, artificially.

Where is the divergence happening? Or you don't view RTX 5x as consumer hardware?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#92

Post by rvz »

meindnoch wrote: post #73

I know this may sound ridiculous, but m-maybe... maybe it's time for us to make software... less bloated? Maybe... just maybe, a TODO list app shouldn't run 4 processes, and consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM?

Tell that to those who are still using Electron, TypeScript to create bloated desktop apps.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#93

Post by upofadown »

This article inspired me to look and see what this computer is. Apparently it is a "AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 250 Processor" from 2009. So 17 years old. It has 8 GB of DDR3 memory and runs at 3 GHz. It currently has OpenBSD on it, but at least one source thinks it could run Windows 10.

The fact that I didn't know any of this is what is significant here. At some point I stopped caring about this sort of thing. It really doesn't matter any more. Don't get my wrong, I am as nerdy as they come. My first computer was a wire wrapped 8080 based system. That was followed by an also wire wrapped 8086 based system of my own design I used for day to day computing tasks (it ran Forth). If someone like me can get to the point of not caring there is no real reason for anyone else to care.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#94

Post by ozgrakkurt »

bluejay2387 wrote: post #61

The general take here seems to be "everything eventually passes". That isn't always true. I wonder how many people have a primary computing device that they don't even have full control over now (Apple phones, tablets...). Years ago the concept of spending over $1k on a computer that I didn't even have the right to install my own software on was considered ridiculous by many people (myself included). Now many people…

To be fair the people that have ipad as their only computer device now didn’t have a computer back then

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#95

Post by zozbot234 »

echelon wrote: post #54
barrkel wrote: post #15

I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time…

Local is a dead end. Open source efforts need to give up on local AI and embrace cloud compute. We need to stop building toy models to run on RTX and instead try to compete with the hyperscalers. We need open weights models that are big and run on H200s. Those are the class of models that will be able to compete. When the hyperscalers reach take off, we're done for. If we can stay within ~6months, we might be able to…

> We need open weights models that are big and run on H200s.

We have this class of models already, Kimi 2.5 and GLM-5 are proper SOTA models. Nemotron might also release a larger-sized model at some time in the future. With the new NVMe-based offload being worked on as of late you can even experiment with these models on your own hardware, but of course there's plenty of cheap third-party inference platforms for these too.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#96

Post by TeMPOraL »

Arn_Thor wrote: post #42
dust42 wrote: post #23

Just to mention one thing, helium -which is a necessity for chip production- is a byproduct of LNG production. And 20% of that is just gone (Qatar) and the question is how long it will take to get that back. So not only a chip shortage because of AI buying chips in huge volumes but also because production will be hampered. Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For the AI and the helium.

Considering my helium-filled hard drives a strategic reserve now

Gonna sit on my half-empty tank for party balloons from my daughter's birthday, maybe we'll be able to sell it to pay off mortgage quicker than the helium itself escapes the tank.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#97

Post by Esophagus4 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #49
torben-friis wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with. I'm not arguing mind you, just trying to understand the usecases people are thinking of here.

> other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? Running Electron apps and browsing React-based websites, of course.

It seems like as hardware gets cheaper, software gets more bloated to compensate. Or maybe it’s vice versa.

I wonder if there’s a computer science law about this. This could be my chance!

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#98

Post by doom2 »

bluejay2387 wrote: post #61

The general take here seems to be "everything eventually passes". That isn't always true. I wonder how many people have a primary computing device that they don't even have full control over now (Apple phones, tablets...). Years ago the concept of spending over $1k on a computer that I didn't even have the right to install my own software on was considered ridiculous by many people (myself included). Now many people…

I'm also very skeptical of "everything eventually passes" as it pertains to hardware prices. Right now, prices are high because supply can't keep up with demand. But if/when supply increases to meet demand or demand decreases, there's no reason for companies to drop prices now that consumers have become accustomed to them.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#99

Post by TeMPOraL »

guardian5x wrote: post #83
meindnoch wrote: post #73

I know this may sound ridiculous, but m-maybe... maybe it's time for us to make software... less bloated? Maybe... just maybe, a TODO list app shouldn't run 4 processes, and consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM?

Let me be the devils advocate here. Ok, let's say you optimize that TODO list app to only use 16 mb of RAM. What did you gain by that? Would you buy a smartphone that has less RAM now?

We can't ever escape the market forces? You're right, of course if software gets less bloated, vendors will "value-optimize" hardware so in the end, computers keep being barely usable as they are today.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#100

Post by zozbot234 »

rswail wrote: post #88

A long article begging the question when the last paragraph or two countered the panic of the beginning. Two Chinese firms are ramping up production of consumer RAM/SSDs because they see a market opening as the existing producers move to selling to enterprise/hyperscalars. There have been memory chip panics before, the US funded RAM production back into the 80s/90s in competition with Japan at the time. The AI boom/"…

> Two Chinese firms are ramping up production of consumer RAM/SSDs because they see a market opening

Yes but these Chinese firms are a tiny share of the overall RAM/SSD market, and they'll have the same problems with expanding production as everyone else. So it doesn't actually help all that much.

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