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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#131

Post by m3nu »

raincole wrote: post #65
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 won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.

My bet is that phone hardware will be used more and more in mini PCs and laptops keeping the cost down and volume up. We see it with Apple and many Chinese mini PC makers I looked at.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#132

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

picture wrote: post #24
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…

It seems like you largely agree with the article - people shall own nothing and be happy. Perhaps the artificially induced supply crunch could go on indefinitely. Also, I wonder how many of us, even here on HN, have the ability to spend that amount of money on computer for personal use. Frankly I wouldn't even know what to do with all the RAM - should I just ramdisk every program I use and every digital thing I made…

Solarpunk + https://permacomputing.net/

That’s for everyone

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#133

Post by bitmasher9 »

doom2 wrote: post #98
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.

My primary concern is for next generation hardware.

Will we continue to see steady improvement in top quality CPU/GPUs? Would they even bother releasing consumer versions of ram faster than DDR5?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#134

Post by numpad0 »

adrianN wrote: post #47
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.

Fusion fuel is so energy dense that fusion plants will never produce industrially meaningful amounts of helium.

Can't they irradiate tanks of H2 or something with so much neutrons and electrons until morale improves and they become He? Or would that make radioactive He?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#135

Post by heffer »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #66
FpUser wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My home server has 512GB RAM, 48 cores, my 4 desktops are 16 cores 128GB, 4060GPU each. Server is second hand and I paid around $2500 for it. Just below $3000 price for desktops when I built them. All prices are in Canadian Pesos

Canadian Pesos?

Please, it's actually Cambodian Dollhairs or Canuckistan Pesos.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#136

Post by 3form »

zozbot234 wrote: post #82
rafaelmn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your battery is going to suffer because of the extra ram as well. I don't know your workloads, but for me personally 64 GB is the ceiling buffer on RAM - I can run entire k8s cluster locally with that and the M5 Pro with top cores is same CPU as M5 Max. I don't need the GPU - the local AI story and OSS models are just a toy for my use-cases and I'm always going to shell out for the API/frontier capabilities. I'm even…

> Your battery is going to suffer because of the extra ram as well. No, it won't. The power drain of merely refreshing DRAM is negligible, it's no higher than the drain you'd see in S3 standby over the same time period.

Given the DRAM refresh is part of S3 standby, I'm afraid this is circular reasoning.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#137

Post by lexlambda »

duskdozer wrote: post #14

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#138

Post by abmmgb »

I actually think the central thesis is thought provoking, we have shifted far away from locally installed shit to remote data centre access, this was initially driven by cloud-based initiatives and now spiralling upwards by AI. For any researchers, hackers, builders wanting to play with locally installed AI, hardware could become a bottleneck especially as many machines, such as the beloved Macs, are not upgradable

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#139

Post by bitmasher9 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #100
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.

Chinese firms won’t have the exact same problems as anyone else. Some problems will be the same but not all.

* Chinese firms finance through different banks and investors than current ram producers

* A company with a mission statement of consumer ram won’t have their supply outbid by data centers

* Chinese manufacturing has more expertise in scaling then any other manufacturing culture

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#140

Post by hombre_fatal »

doom2 wrote: post #98
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.

> there's no reason for companies to drop prices

Competition.

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