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Ex-YouTube Man Builds Graphics Card for Entire Internet

wired.com

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Re: Ex-YouTube Man Builds Graphics Card for Entire Internet

#2

Post by chiph »

“We would just walk into one Apple store after another and buy them out”

Apple has good terms for business purchases. Spend more than $2k and get 18 months interest-free financing. No need to drive around to all the stores (unless you just want the airline points on your credit card)

Re: Ex-YouTube Man Builds Graphics Card for Entire Internet

#3

Post by ams6110 »

chiph wrote: post #2

“We would just walk into one Apple store after another and buy them out” Apple has good terms for business purchases. Spend more than $2k and get 18 months interest-free financing. No need to drive around to all the stores (unless you just want the airline points on your credit card)

Is the graphics card in a Mac Mini really that good? Seems there would be cheaper ways to buy commodity hardware and put the savings towards a better graphics card.

Re: Ex-YouTube Man Builds Graphics Card for Entire Internet

#4

Post by revelation »

ams6110 wrote: post #3
chiph wrote: post #2

“We would just walk into one Apple store after another and buy them out” Apple has good terms for business purchases. Spend more than $2k and get 18 months interest-free financing. No need to drive around to all the stores (unless you just want the airline points on your credit card)

Is the graphics card in a Mac Mini really that good? Seems there would be cheaper ways to buy commodity hardware and put the savings towards a better graphics card.

The latest Mac Mini uses the HD4000. It doesn't come with a dedicated graphics card.

Its rated around 100 megahashes. A 6990 gets you 800MH.

Re: Ex-YouTube Man Builds Graphics Card for Entire Internet

#5

Post by zacman85 »

ams6110 wrote: post #3
chiph wrote: post #2

“We would just walk into one Apple store after another and buy them out” Apple has good terms for business purchases. Spend more than $2k and get 18 months interest-free financing. No need to drive around to all the stores (unless you just want the airline points on your credit card)

Is the graphics card in a Mac Mini really that good? Seems there would be cheaper ways to buy commodity hardware and put the savings towards a better graphics card.

They do a fair enough job for what we needed. Really, it was more about what we could get quickly, with a certain expectation of consistency, just to get us moving forward.

Re: Ex-YouTube Man Builds Graphics Card for Entire Internet

#6

Post by adlpz »

ams6110 wrote: post #3
chiph wrote: post #2

“We would just walk into one Apple store after another and buy them out” Apple has good terms for business purchases. Spend more than $2k and get 18 months interest-free financing. No need to drive around to all the stores (unless you just want the airline points on your credit card)

Is the graphics card in a Mac Mini really that good? Seems there would be cheaper ways to buy commodity hardware and put the savings towards a better graphics card.

I know I'm parallel-commenting here the guy himself, but seriously, I believe this is just what happens when you either have too much money, are too lazy, or both.

I am pretty sure they could have come up with a basic MoBo+GPU+CPU+RAM combo to buy from a large distributor, assemble them in series in no-time and get a vastly cheaper and more powerful farm.

Walking around buying mac minis a dozen a time to build a data center is just silly in my opinion, whatever the reasoning.

Re: Ex-YouTube Man Builds Graphics Card for Entire Internet

#7

Post by dgreensp »

I tried imgix for thumbnails in a web photo album. It was much slower (higher latency) and double the price per bandwidth of Amazon Cloudfront. In general, then, resizing all the images in advance and serving them from a traditional CDN offers a better experience at a better price. Only if that's impossible is imgix a good choice.

Being a premium CDN seems a bit like being a premium credit card processor -- as customers grow, they have more and more incentive to switch to a commodity alternative.

Re: Ex-YouTube Man Builds Graphics Card for Entire Internet

#8

Post by zacman85 »

adlpz wrote: post #6
ams6110 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the graphics card in a Mac Mini really that good? Seems there would be cheaper ways to buy commodity hardware and put the savings towards a better graphics card.

I know I'm parallel-commenting here the guy himself, but seriously, I believe this is just what happens when you either have too much money, are too lazy, or both. I am pretty sure they could have come up with a basic MoBo+GPU+CPU+RAM combo to buy from a large distributor, assemble them in series in no-time and get a vastly cheaper and more powerful farm. Walking around buying mac minis a dozen a time to build a data…

You are not wrong. And we were very well aware of this. However, we found the reality of the problem being solved is much more about network latency, routing, and caching than actual graphics processing throughput. Our pain points have been very different than what you are prescribing as a better course of action.

Re: Ex-YouTube Man Builds Graphics Card for Entire Internet

#9

Post by ekurutepe »

Isn't it a bit wasteful to resize all those images on the fly? I'd think it's much better to resize them at creation and serve different files as they're needed, assumption being here that dumbly serving a file is more power efficient/cheaper than rescaling a large image every time a smaller version is needed.
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