331–340 of 662 posts
Running a small project on Hetzner from Germany. Got the email this morning. Honestly, even after the increase their dedicated boxes are still absurdly cheap compared to what you'd pay at AWS or GCP for equivalent specs. The real story here isn't Hetzner being greedy. It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax. I priced out a RAM upgrade for my home ser…
Running a small project on Hetzner from Germany. Got the email this morning. Honestly, even after the increase their dedicated boxes are still absurdly cheap compared to what you'd pay at AWS or GCP for equivalent specs. The real story here isn't Hetzner being greedy. It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax. I priced out a RAM upgrade for my home ser…
> It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax. DRAM is priced based on supply and demand, like every other market. When demand goes up, the price goes up for everyone. It’s not a “tax” on the rest of us in any sense. There’s just a lot of demand everywhere. > That's not normal market dynamics. This is actually a textbook example of markets functioning in…
I'm surprised this isn't already what's being done. Inference doesn't require super low latency with the client, and the population's support of AI (and especially data centers for it) is waning quickly. This feels like another ideal use case for outsourcing the stuff Americans don't want to see to somewhere that it'll be someone else's problem.
I assume this is a symptom of the wider ai hardware issue. This is starting to feel a bit like universal paperclips to me, and we are on the verge of the next stage of industrialisation multiplication. I guess its either quantum computing or the hypnodrones which will get us out of this mess one way or another...
My compliments for the hypnodrones reference
Releasing the Hypnodrones is always a very satisfying milestone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most markets don't have three purchasers trying to corner the entire supply of one product.
Economic history is full of examples of demand shocks. This is not some unique situation that has never occurred before. This is actually a clean commodity price spike because it’s specifically not for market manipulation or financial engineering. It’s because demand for this product really did explode overnight.
Weird hill..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are those plants still functional after CHIPS act was axed? I thought they mainly produce in Asia now.
Well first of all, the CHIPS Act was not "axed", it is federal law passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority of the House and Senate. It would take a complete reversal of congress to repeal it and it's still very popular among both parties. Where do you get your information from?
DOGE cut basically all staff from the CHIPS Program Office, congress passed the money but Trump is choosing to turn it into a slush-fund the admin spends on industrial policy (such as buying a stake in Intel). Wolfspeed went into bankruptcy in part because the admin delayed CHIPS funding agreed by the previous admin [1] (it's unclear whether they received the grant now that they have left it).
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/4aac09f9-19df-401a-9ab3-ef14a47bb...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Factory capacity does not follow market dynamics easily
I think the usefulness of market dynamics is their ability to follow things like factory capacity, which are themselves hard to follow, not the other way around.
A key element is that China still acts as a block.. So Chinese firms have lost a big opportunity by not making DDR4 yet aren't ready with DDR5. When they are ready it will probably tank the market which is less profitable than selling at high prices with actual availability of something the whole time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
8 threads at 3.4 GHz, 8MB cache. Seems fine, depending on your use case.
Measuring CPUs by thread count and clock speed is not a good way to gauge performance. A current gen CPU would be several times faster than this old CPU. Depending on workload, this old CPU might be as slow as a 2 thread or even 1 thread current gen server.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But aren't those the same startups that think they need to run on AWS EKS instead of using a single cheap server? The cheapest used Hetzner server currently is €39.24 / month: - Intel Core i7-6700 - 32 GB - 2 x 480 GB Datacenter SSD - 1 GB/s - 20 TB traffic Their VPS are even cheaper. And you can run a lot on this.
Except 40€ a month is extremely poor value for this CPU that's more than a decade old.
This is a rather baffling opinion to have. All cloud providers charge far more for a virtualized instance running on God knows what hardware. You are faced with a deal where you can run your software on bare metal, and you complain about... About what exactly?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But they cant refresh hardware already sold to customers can they? So increasing prices on existing cutomer hardware is what, subsidising hardware refreshes elsewhere in the datacenter?
Often they do not actually sell you hardware servers, but VMs running on them, with designated properties.
You either buy VPS or bare metal servers.