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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

#311

Post by lukeschlather »

miningape wrote: post #125
bogtog wrote: post #4

A few months ago, there was a lot of news lambasting tech companies for extending the depreciation lifespan of GPUs from ~3 years to ~5 years. Do these price hikes suggest a longer lifespan is probably the right way to see how long these GPUs will be valuable?

Not a finance guy, so fully prepared to be wrong here. But my interpretation is that an increase in price corresponds to a shorter lifespan. i.e. less time to make money so we need to charge more to get the same return over less time It could also be a supply/demand issue, generally price increases are caused by either 1. demand increasing, or 2. supply decreasing. In this case we can interpret a shorter lifespan as…

The thing historically about GPUs has not been the actual lifespan of the hardware (at least half of the hardware will probably work fine for 10 or more years) the problem is that work/watt is dropping for newer hardware, so there's a point where even if you had an equivalent quantity of 10-year-old GPUs, powering them for some period costs $40k and you can buy a single brand-new GPU that costs $40k but only costs $20K to power for the same period which is less than a few years.

I don't think we're seeing any decrease in supply though, ignoring 2020 I'm pretty sure the number of GPUs manufactured has been steadily increasing. It might be the case that projected manufacturing was higher than what actually happened, which is not the same thing as a decrease in supply, but companies like Amazon will talk about it like it is, and from the standpoint of their pricing it essentially is.

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

#313

Post by dev_l1x_be »

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…

Or we rewrite everything in Rust and stop using JS on websites and watch how the computational efficiency and lack of bloat impacts the market?

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

#314

Post by general1465 »

pmdr wrote: post #228
general1465 wrote: post #207

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? No we don't. In Eastern Block during communism everything was either expensive or unavailable to the point that picking up broken TV on the side of the road and dismantling it for parts was making complete sense and you could actually learn something. Today it is much easier. You can visit e…

Windows 10 is mostly EOL because M$ doesn't want you using older machines, no matter how powerful.

That does not matter at all. When it comes to computation people will just use what's at hand. Windows 7 are still around, Windows 10 are going to be here for a long time.

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

#315

Post by lancekey »

a1371 wrote: post #181
lancekey wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been working on computeprices.com as a side project for the last year to do just that.

I was not expecting that the prices are going down. Makes sense as the hardware gets older but I always assumed the prices must be inflated given how much competition there is to make new datacenters

Yes i was surprised too. I think it's mostly newer models pushing older ones down. I think there's also a lot of competitive pressure in this market. And the GPU shortage is not really a thing anymore.

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

#316

Post by ipnon »

cwoolfe wrote: post #312

What's the most cost-effective way to run open source models using cloud infrastructure? AWS? Digital Ocean? salad.com? Lambda.ai? Vast.ai? Use case is infrequent and small usage, but needs to be able to scale to match increasing demand.

Modal is great for infrequent batches.

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

#317

Post by lukeschlather »

candiddevmike wrote: post #35
aurareturn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demand for GPUs is increasing overall. So it's very likely that AWS GPU demand is rising. AWS isn't the only company offering GPUs for rent so raising prices doesn't make sense unless demand is rising faster than supply.

The only real visibility we have into the demand side (kinda) are spot prices, and those seem to be flat or decreasing for GPU instances. Surely if there was this crazy, exponential demand, spot prices would reflect that.

I wouldn't say exponential, I would also say it's likely that Amazon is projecting demand to rise faster than it is. (But it is still consistently rising, and with demand rising they would prefer to overestimate than underestimate.)

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

#318

Post by pphysch »

y0ssar1an wrote: post #293
pphysch wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Taiwan destroying its own assets disincentivize annexation goals that have existed long before computer chips were produced there?

If Taiwan is being invaded, the annexation is happening. There's no longer any reason to disincentivize annexation. Destroying the fabs is about denying China a major prize.

Destroying the fabs would hurt the West a lot more than China, which is rapidly playing catch up (while US and EU are not).

The other glaring flaw in this pop-geopolitics narrative is that China already has enormous economic leverage over the West, even without the chip supply chain.

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

#319

Post by elorant »

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…

This assumes everyone’s sitting on a fast fiber connection which is hardly the case. Even metropolitan areas in most cities don’t have universal fiber connection.

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

#320

Post by zozbot234 »

lukeschlather wrote: post #311
miningape wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a finance guy, so fully prepared to be wrong here. But my interpretation is that an increase in price corresponds to a shorter lifespan. i.e. less time to make money so we need to charge more to get the same return over less time It could also be a supply/demand issue, generally price increases are caused by either 1. demand increasing, or 2. supply decreasing. In this case we can interpret a shorter lifespan as…

The thing historically about GPUs has not been the actual lifespan of the hardware (at least half of the hardware will probably work fine for 10 or more years) the problem is that work/watt is dropping for newer hardware, so there's a point where even if you had an equivalent quantity of 10-year-old GPUs, powering them for some period costs $40k and you can buy a single brand-new GPU that costs $40k but only costs $2…

> the problem is that work/watt is dropping for newer hardware, so there's a point where even if you had an equivalent quantity of 10-year-old GPUs, powering them for some period costs $40k

Sell the old-gen GPU's to on-prem users (including home consumers) who are going to run them a small % of the time (so power use is more or less negligible to them compared to acquisition cost), problem solved.

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