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AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

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Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#231

Post by kllrnohj »

cyberpunk wrote: post #177
bluGill wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subscription is still worth it for most people though. Sure it costs more, but your 2TB plan isn't a single harddrive, it is likely across several harddrives with RAID ensuring that when (not if!) they fail no data is lost, plus remote backups. When something breaks the subscription fixes that for no extra charge. If you know how to admin a computer and have time for it, then doing it yourself is cheaper. However mak…

I’m not even sure it does cost more. I could have a geforcenow subscription for like 8 years before it’s more expensive than building a similar spec gaming rig.

Depends on how much you play. geforcenow is limited to 100 hours a month, with additional hours sold at a 200% premium. This dramatically changes the economics ( https://www.techpowerup.com/344359/nvidia-puts-100-hour-mont... has a handy chart for this )

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#232

Post by SirMaster »

TrackerFF wrote: post #89
muvlon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how everyone arrives at that conclusion when the cost of the subscription services is also going up (as evidenced by the very article we're talking about). People who are renting are feeling this immediately, whereas people who bought their computers can wait the price hikes out for a couple years before they really need an upgrade.

Difference is that if subscription goes up from $10 to $15, that doesn't seem to bad. But if you want to purchase a new computer, and the price goes from $1000 to $1500, then that's a pretty big deal. (Though in reality, the price of said computer would probably go up even more, minimum double. RAM prices are already up 6-8 fold from summer)

Building a PC price is not double lol and RAM is nowhere near up 6-8x

https://www.bestbuy.com/product/crucial-pro-overclocking-32g...

That 32GB for $274 was not $34-$45 in the summer. RAM is up like 3x, but RAM is one of the cheaper parts of the PC.

RAM that was $100 in summer is like $300 now when I look. So that's an extra $200 maybe $300, on say a $1500 build.

GPUs are not up, they are still at MSRP:

https://www.bestbuy.com/product/asus-prime-nvidia-geforce-rt...

SSDs are up marginally, maybe $50 more lets say for a 2TB.

So from summer you are looking at like a $250-350 increase on say a $1500 PC

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#233

Post by nostrademons »

nicoburns wrote: post #108
xvxvx wrote: post #12

- GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising - hard drive prices rising Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? ‘You don't need storage space, use our cloud subscription’ ‘You don’t need processing power, stream your games through our subscription service.’ Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games…

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? The supply chains for high-end chips are brittle enough that it's a very real possibility we end up with a severe supply crunch such that neither clouds nor individual users can access new chips at anything approaching reasonable prices. TSMC owns 60% of the foundry market. So if China decid…

I sometimes wonder if this is the real reason for the AI bubble. Major cloud providers are trying to front-load their computing purchases in case geopolitical trouble makes it impossible to get computers. At cloud scale, that's billions of dollars in new investment. So they kick off a new computing paradigm, hype it up, and now their cost of capital for this new investment is significantly lower because they can sell it as getting a piece of future revenues. Basically just a way to make shareholders pay for geopolitical hedging.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#234

Post by 63stack »

xvxvx wrote: post #12

- GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising - hard drive prices rising Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? ‘You don't need storage space, use our cloud subscription’ ‘You don’t need processing power, stream your games through our subscription service.’ Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games…

Also, even if/when the AI bubble pops (whether it exists is irrelevant to my point), all the companies who have been hoarding the hardware can naturally progress into selling this new "stream everything through a subscription" service, further delaying (possibly forever if it's successful) price normalization.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#235

Post by kllrnohj »

bluGill wrote: post #137
kllrnohj wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Difference is subscriptions need to support IT staff, data centers, and profit margins. A computer under your desk at home has none of those support costs and it gets price competition from used parts which subscriptions don't have. Cloud (storage, compute, whatever) has so far consistently been more expensive than local compute over even short timeframes (storage especially, I can buy a portable 2TB drive for the eq…

Subscription is still worth it for most people though. Sure it costs more, but your 2TB plan isn't a single harddrive, it is likely across several harddrives with RAID ensuring that when (not if!) they fail no data is lost, plus remote backups. When something breaks the subscription fixes that for no extra charge. If you know how to admin a computer and have time for it, then doing it yourself is cheaper. However mak…

> Sure it costs more, but your 2TB plan isn't a single harddrive, it is likely across several harddrives with RAID ensuring that when (not if!) they fail no data is lost, plus remote backups. When something breaks the subscription fixes that for no extra charge.

Well yes, of course. And for cloud compute you get that same uptime expectation. Which if you need it is wonderful (and for something like data arguably critical for almost everyone). But if we're just talking something like a video game console? Ehhh, not so much. So no, you don't include the backup system cost just because cloud has it. You only include that cost if you want it.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#236

Post by diordiderot »

Noaidi wrote: post #171
lynndotpy wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Moore's Law" purports that there is more computer over time. "Sam's Law" purports that we asymptote to have a consistent amount of computer; or, we have the same amount of computer over time. "Leslie's Law" purports that we peak and then start to decrease; or, we eventually have less computer over time. We might be living in Sam's world or even Leslie's world.

"Moore's Law" thrives under socialism. "Sam's Law" exists under neoliberalism. "Leslie's Law" is the result of fascism.

I mean, you just made that up but sure.

China is essentially a pinko branded fascist state and they continue to develop better processors

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#237

Post by Filligree »

tbrownaw wrote: post #106
haritha-j wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a resource allocation perspective, this doesn't feel particularly undesirable, at least in terms of certain assets like vehicles. The current system of ownership is quite wasteful. I own a high end GPU that I use maybe 4 hours a week for gaming.

> From a resource allocation perspective, this doesn't feel particularly undesirable, at least in terms of certain assets like vehicles. The current system of ownership is quite wasteful. People are by and large not that dumb. If they consistently choose a more expensive alternative, it means the cheaper alternative is missing something that matters. > I own a high end GPU that I use maybe 4 hours a week for gaming.…

> Why? Why currently prevents you from being more efficient and streaming your display from the cloud?

Latency. 120ms extra latency makes many games uncomfortable, and some of them entirely unplayable.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#238

Post by xantronix »

SPICLK2 wrote: post #133
nicoburns wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? The supply chains for high-end chips are brittle enough that it's a very real possibility we end up with a severe supply crunch such that neither clouds nor individual users can access new chips at anything approaching reasonable prices. TSMC owns 60% of the foundry market. So if China decid…

It's a one-way journey, unless we can adapt quickly enough to a drastic reduction in the general availability of compute power. IMO, our reliance on bloated tech is an existential risk, and reverting to some reasonable baseline needs addressing as urgently as any other current crisis.

I have been waiting for quite some time for some sort of reckoning with our glut for compute resources, but for years I had optimistically assumed this would be due to physical constraints rather than artificial socioeconomic ones. Now is the most advantageous time to be a retrocomputing enthusiast as the definition of "retrocomputing" may seek to expand to engulf the whole category of home computing.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#239

Post by Hizonner »

bluGill wrote: post #152
kllrnohj wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TSMC owns 60% of the foundry market. So if China decides to invade Taiwan, that would likely mean ~60% of CPU and GPU manufacturing capacity permanently destroyed at once. While it would certainly be devastating, do note that TSMC has fabs in places that aren't Taiwan. So their entire production wouldn't immediately go offline, and presumably China would still want to keep selling those products and would have an i…

> presumably China would still want to keep selling those products and would have an interest in avoiding destroying those factories It has been hinted by people who might know something that Taiwan has rigged their factories to explode if China invades to ensure China can't get a hold of those factories. I'm not sure if it is true, but it wouldn't be hard to do (the hard part is ensuring the explosives don't go off…

Not to mention the number of random individuals, with enough access, who might want to sabotage them in those circumstances. And fuck knows what the Trump administration decides to bomb. And the general fog of war. And how delicate everything is.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#240

Post by vladvasiliu »

walthamstow wrote: post #167
vladvasiliu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As sibling says, the question is too vague. I also pay for icloud, but I store all my things locally on my devices. The point is effortless sync and basic backup (protect pictures from phone theft). I also pay Hetzner for a storage box or whatever it's called, where I regularly send backups of my stuff with restic. One of the sources is a local fat ZFS NAS, which I can access from everywhere via wireguard. Yet, the o…

You're someone who is comfortable in a terminal desktop environment on Linux. What you or I do for storage is irrelevant to the wider consumer market. Apple's hardware prices mean that millions of people buy the smallest on offer and pay Apple monthly instead. It's a deliberate play for recurring services revenue. My point is this: would they buy a phone that had virtually-zero free storage and rely solely on iCloud?…

I don't know, do these small-storage-size models actually have that big a market share compared to the others?

They also sell 1 TB iPhones and I think on the latest generation the minimum storage has been increased. If nobody bought them they wouldn't sell them (see the lack of newer "mini" models).

I always thought that these models with tiny storage and tiny ram (for laptops) where just so that they could hook you with a low "starting from" price.

My point wasn't that "nobody falls into apple's trap", I'm sure plenty do. Rather, unless you're sure your audience is representative of the "wider consumer market", just asking them if they pay for icloud and they say yes, it doesn't prove much.

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