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

Performance per dollar is getting faster and cheaper

wafer.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 151 posts

Re: Performance per dollar is getting faster and cheaper

#101

Post by rpdillon »

ffsm8 wrote: post #67
butvacuum wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say they have a large impact, but having lived somewhere with some of the largest data centers- they very much don't. At least not more so then any other structure that paves over greenery. love to debate actual discission points. pull up "datacenter dfw" on google maps for mine.

The people having glass literally break from the vibrations would probably disagree with your opinion https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo?is=sg09k66iutKFIFSo Yet here we are, discussing "data center" as if they're standardized and of similar (nose) isolation. There are no meaningful regulations in building them, and they can be incredibly polluting. So your experience with a potentially well isolated one is sadly not the no…

How far do you live from a data center?

Re: Performance per dollar is getting faster and cheaper

#102

Post by wongarsu »

__egb__ wrote: post #100
fragmede wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem these days is lack of nuance. It should seem entirely reasonable to be pro-datacenters-if-they're-done-right, but it feels like there are only two sides to any issue. Gas turbine whine noise isn't coming from the data center, it's being used to power the data center, but the camp is either pro data center or not, and fuck any nuance.

Maybe the lack of nuance is due to learning, through decades of experience, that the assumption “it won’t be done right” can be baked in.

So people have a decades-long expectation that local government will fail them?

This does sound plausible, but it's also pretty sad and not a sign of a healthy democracy

Re: Performance per dollar is getting faster and cheaper

#104

Post by wongarsu »

ekianjo wrote: post #86
embedding-shape wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have never seen a company use AMD outside of wafer and a couple others mostly in US. Worth remembering AMD basically "owns" (not literally) the hardware-side of things in video games consoles for good many years now, with no end in sight.

Because they have x86 CPU licenses.

Consoles used to all be custom architectures. If Intel was the only one doing x86 and AMD had offered the same price, performance and features as they do now, but in another architecture, my bet is that in that universe AMD would still have gotten the contract. Using x86 is a big deal to simplify things, but so is AMD's APU with unified memory between CPU and GPU (similar to what Apple now does with their silicon)

Re: Performance per dollar is getting faster and cheaper

#105

Post by wongarsu »

embedding-shape wrote: post #89
7thpower wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically any company that can’t get Nvidia to fill their orders will have at least some AMD.

What type of company are you talking about here? Granted, nowadays I mostly interact with ML-adjacent companies but almost none would go "Hmm, hard to get nvidia hardware today, lets dump all expertise and knowledge of CUDA et al we have and start using AMD hardware until we can get nvidia", everyone would just wait or rent in the meantime.

Inference workloads are usually a lot less picky about the exact hardware than model training. At least in the cases I know of the models are trained on Nvidia hardware, then exported and run on a mix of Nvidia and AMD

Re: Performance per dollar is getting faster and cheaper

#106

Post by ninjalanternshk »

ffsm8 wrote: post #67
butvacuum wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say they have a large impact, but having lived somewhere with some of the largest data centers- they very much don't. At least not more so then any other structure that paves over greenery. love to debate actual discission points. pull up "datacenter dfw" on google maps for mine.

The people having glass literally break from the vibrations would probably disagree with your opinion https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo?is=sg09k66iutKFIFSo Yet here we are, discussing "data center" as if they're standardized and of similar (nose) isolation. There are no meaningful regulations in building them, and they can be incredibly polluting. So your experience with a potentially well isolated one is sadly not the no…

> There are no meaningful regulations in building them

If a municipality doesn’t have emissions, noise, water use, etc regulations, that’s a serious failure in governance.

We don’t need nor want the word “data center” in regulations anymore than we need the word “abattoir.”

The names of the things we build change all the time. Their impact on their communities don’t.

We need to regulate impact, not the name or type of business.

If we did, nobody would know or care about data centers and they wouldn’t be affecting their communities, because they’d be operating under established impact regulations.

Re: Performance per dollar is getting faster and cheaper

#107

Post by ninjalanternshk »

fragmede wrote: post #93
Liftyee wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though, the new data centers are not entirely the same. Increasing use of onsite gas turbines to generate power instead of using grid power changes their noise+air pollution profile.

The problem these days is lack of nuance. It should seem entirely reasonable to be pro-datacenters-if-they're-done-right, but it feels like there are only two sides to any issue. Gas turbine whine noise isn't coming from the data center, it's being used to power the data center, but the camp is either pro data center or not, and fuck any nuance.

The problem is people keep trying to regulate businesses by name instead of by the effects they have.

If we had regulations on noise, vibration, emissions, water use, electromagnetic radiation, whatever else, then it wouldn’t matter what people tried to build — if it fits within the guidelines great, otherwise back to the drawing board.

Putting “data center” in your ordinances is as lazy and ineffective as putting “abattoir.”

Re: Performance per dollar is getting faster and cheaper

#108

Post by 48484949 »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #95
nxtfari wrote: post #32

I think we should make it illegal to not specify the quantization in the headline for these types of posts.

A nice filter is checking for the `.ai` in the end. It is very likely slop if you see that. Slop meaning low-effort/clickbait/shallow/useless/scam etc.

[flagged]

Re: Performance per dollar is getting faster and cheaper

#110

Post by jingpostmedia »

minraws wrote: post #2

Can you folks add performance per watt as a metric to these comparisons, I honestly want to understand where AMD fits in the stack in terms of actual performance to dollars. I have had talks with companies wanting to build data centers outside of US and find it hard to source anything Nvidia in sufficient capacity and scale. If AMD is competitive performance per watt and roughly reliable in terms of software support…

[flagged]
Post reply on HN