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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#141

Post by 2716057 »

As long as there are consumers paying for hardware ownership there will be businesses willing to sell it to them. The worst scenario I could imagine is that one has to pay a premium for fully-owned hardware simply because consumer's desire for it becomes an oddity and it is thus sold in low quantities.

The current AI-induced shortages aside, the times have never been better in my opinion. There is overwhelming choice; ordinary consumers can access anything from Raspberry PIs all the way up to enterprise servers and AI accelerators. The situation was very different in the 1990s when I built my first PC.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#142

Post by [deleted] »

numpad0 wrote: post #134
adrianN wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#143

Post by girvo »

kgeist wrote: post #91
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?

Blackwell diverges within Blackwell itself… SM121 on the GB10 vs the RTX 5000 consumer vs the actual full fat B100 hardware all have surprisingly different abilities. The GB10 has been hamstrung by this a bit, too.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#144

Post by SeanAnderson »

upofadown wrote: post #93

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 do…

Someone's never tried to locally compile a Rust program. :)

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#145

Post by [deleted] »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #97
zozbot234 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

[deleted]

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#146

Post by xbmcuser »

In the last month 20-30% of oil supply 30% gas supply and 30-40% of fertilizer production has been destroyed and could take any where from 8 months to 5 years to come back online. Governments are acting as everything is okay so that there is no panic but we have crossed the point of no return even if the war ends today food & energy shortages are over the horizon. If you can get an ev, solar heat pumps, battery storage etc get it now today as fossil fuel based energy prices are going to go through the roof. I see similarities to when covid hit people kept looking at things happening in other countries and not preparing for the shit to hit their own cities and countries.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#147

Post by vladvasiliu »

teeray wrote: post #104
zozbot234 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Companies love externalizing the costs of making efficient software onto consumers, who need to purchase more powerful computing hardware.

If only. At work I've got a new computer, replacing a lower-end 5-yo model. The new one has four times the cores, twice the RAM, a non-circus-grade ssd, a high-powered cpu as opposed to the "u" series chip the old one has.

I haven't noticed any kind of difference when using Teams. That piece of crap is just as slow and borken as it always was.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#148

Post by bitmasher9 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #64
adrianN wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, as long as they can make electricity too cheap to meter, we can get helium from somewhere . Mine it from LNG sources currently untapped due to EROI < 1, or ship it from the goddamn Moon - ultimately, every problem in life (except that of human heart) can be solved with cheap energy.

With the trend of orbital launches becoming cheaper, it might be that mining helium off-Tera will be our long term supply. Especially if the alternative is adjusting the amount of protons in an atom.

There are several challenges, not least of which is storage. We have considerable leakage in most of our current helium storage solutions on earth because it’s so light. Our national reserves are literally in underground caverns because it’s better than anything we can build. Space just means any containment system will need to work in a wider range of pressure/temperatures.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#149

Post by Tade0 »

not_the_fda wrote: post #16
camgunz wrote: post #2

I feel like this is just the bubble talking. I'm pretty naive here, but at some point suppliers will adjust so they can take money from data center builders and consumers, just like pre-bubble.

Chip manufacturers are used to boom bust cycles and are always hesitant to bring on more capacity, since it costs billions to do so. They will let the hyperscalers buy their supply at a premium and wait for the bust. Then they will shift back to the consumer space. Hardware is going to be expensive for awhile but its not as dire as the article makes it out to be.

I recall how in the 2010s RAM manufacturers were in crisis, as their margins were low and competition fierce - it got to a point where they started doing price fixing and got fined for it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180513133803/https://www.techr...

Prices went down again after that.

To me this is just a temporary swing in the other direction - they're riding the gravy train while they can, because once it ends it's back to low prices.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#150

Post by cjs_ac »

einr wrote: post #129
1970-01-01 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your electricity bill alone could justify the cost of a new computer purchase if you're not shutting that down after every session.

65W TDP? Let's say we want to run a PC so we're switching to a newer low-end Ryzen with a 35W TDP and that that's a 30W difference for the whole system. Let's say we're running the system 24/7 and the CPU is pulling its full TDP constantly. Average US residential electricity price is $0.18/kWh. 0.03 kW * 24 h * 365 d * $0.18 = $47.30/year

In the UK, residential electricity tariffs are currently capped by the regulator at 27.69p per kWh, resulting in a total yearly cost of £72.77. Much higher than in the US, but still much cheaper than a new PC.
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