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

Hold on to Your Hardware

xn--gckvb8fzb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 559 posts

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#331

Post by random3 »

raincole wrote: post #65
barrkel wrote: post #15

I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time…

We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.

Apple just launched a $600 amazing laptop and the top models have massive performance. What are we talking about here?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#332

Post by WillAdams »

adregan wrote: post #329
WillAdams wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3D CAD/CAM is still CPU (and to a lesser extent memory) bound --- I do joinery, and my last attempt at a test joint for a project I'm still working up to was a 1" x 2" x 1" area (two 1" x 1" x 1" halves which mated) which took an entry-level CAM program some 18--20 minutes to calculate and made a ~140MB file including G-code toolpaths.... (really should have tracked memory usage....)

Is that by convention or is there a good reason that it’s so CPU bound? I don’t have experience with CAD, so I’m not sure if it’s due to entrenched solutions or something else.

My understanding is that the problems being worked on do not yield to breaking down into parallelizable parts in an efficient/easily-calculated/unambiguous fashion.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#333

Post by itchynosedev »

organsnyder wrote: post #242
Carrok wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been self hosting for years. The maintenance is minimal to nonexistent. You are conflating modern SaaS with a stable OSS docker image.

Keeping services running is fairly trivial. Getting to parity with the operationalization you get from a cloud platform takes more ongoing work. I have a homelab that supports a number of services for my family. I have offsite backups (rsync.net for most data, a server sitting at our cottage for our media library), alerting, and some redundancy for hardware failures. Right now, I have a few things I need to fix: - on…

A hidden cost of self-hosting.

I love self-hosting and run tons of services that I use daily. The thought of random hardware failures scares me, though. Troubleshooting hardware failure is hard and time consuming. Having spare minipcs is expensive. My NAS server failing would have the biggest impact, however.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#334

Post by andor »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #64
adrianN wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion fuel is so energy dense that fusion plants will never produce industrially meaningful amounts of helium.

Well, as long as they can make electricity too cheap to meter, we can get helium from somewhere . Mine it from LNG sources currently untapped due to EROI < 1, or ship it from the goddamn Moon - ultimately, every problem in life (except that of human heart) can be solved with cheap energy.

Fusion power that uses steam turbines to convert heat into electricity will be more expensive than solar/wind

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#335

Post by EvanAnderson »

random3 wrote: post #331
raincole wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.

Apple just launched a $600 amazing laptop and the top models have massive performance. What are we talking about here?

I don't think personal computers will go away, but I think the era of "put it together yourself" commodity PC parts is likely coming to an end. I think we're going to see manufacturers back out of that space as demand decreases. Part selection will become more sparse. That will drive further contraction as the market dries up. Buying boxed motherboards, CPUs, video cards, etc, will still exist, but the prices will never recover back to the "golden age".

The large PC builders (Dell, HP, Lenovo) will continue down the road of cost reduction and proprietary parts. For the vast majority of people pre-packaged machines from the "big 3" are good enough. (Obviously, Apple will continue to Apple, too.)

I think bespoke commodity PCs will go the route, pricing wise, of machines like the Raptor Talos machines.

Edit: For a lot of people the fully customized bespoke PC experience is preferred. I used to be that person.

I also get why that doesn't seem like a big deal. I've been a "Dell laptop as a daily driver" user for >20 years now. My two home servers are just Dell server machines, too. I got tired of screwing around with hardware and the specs Dell provided were close enough to what I wanted.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#336

Post by Aurornis »

chmod775 wrote: post #323
Aurornis wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference is going to be smaller for CPU perf, but also not close. This is not true. The recent MacBook Pros are every bit as fast as my Zen 5 desktop for most tasks like compiling. For GPU there is a difference because both are constrained by thermal and power requirements where the desktop has a big advantage. For CPU compute, the laptop can actually be faster for single threaded work and comparable for mult…

> The recent MacBook Pros are every bit as fast as my Zen 5 desktop for most tasks like compiling. Bad example. That's highly parallel, so a higher core-count die is going to destroy the base M5 here. I don't typically compile Linux on my M5, so I don't really care, but at least online available clang benchmarks put it at roughly half the LOC/s of a 9950X, which released in 2024. Anything single threaded it should ma…

> Bad example. That's highly parallel, so a higher core-count die is going to destroy the base M5 here.

The base M5 starts at 10 cores and scales to 18 cores. The performance is similar to high end dekstop consumer CPUs.

> I don't typically compile Linux on my M5, so I don't really care,

If you don't compile large codebases, why do you care then?

I do compile large codebases and I'm speaking from experience with the same codebase on both platforms. Not "LOC/s" benchmarks

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#337

Post by wwweston »

guardian5x wrote: post #83
meindnoch wrote: post #73

I know this may sound ridiculous, but m-maybe... maybe it's time for us to make software... less bloated? Maybe... just maybe, a TODO list app shouldn't run 4 processes, and consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM?

Let me be the devils advocate here. Ok, let's say you optimize that TODO list app to only use 16 mb of RAM. What did you gain by that? Would you buy a smartphone that has less RAM now?

Easier to run your todo list at the same time as applications that need the RAM for raw function. Maybe that’s CAD, maybe that’s A/V production, maybe it’s a context window.

It’s been convenient that we can throw better hardware at our constraints regularly. Our convenience much less our personal economic functions is not necessarily what markets will generally optimize for, much like developers of electron apps aren’t optimizing for user resources.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#338

Post by Aurornis »

random3 wrote: post #331
raincole wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.

Apple just launched a $600 amazing laptop and the top models have massive performance. What are we talking about here?

Reading some of the doomer comments in this thread feels like taking a glimpse into a different world.

We're out here with amazing performance in $600 laptops that last all day on battery and half of this comment section is acting like personal computing is over.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#339

Post by clusterhacks »

barrkel wrote: post #15

I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time…

"I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop . . . "

This is where I think current hackers should be headed. I grew up with lots of family who were backyard mechanics, wrenching on cars and motorcycles. Their investment in tools made my occasional PC purchase look extremely affordable. Based on what I read, senior mechanics often have five-figure US dollar investments in tools. Of course, I guess high quality torque wrenches probably outlast current GPU chips? I'd hate to be stuck making a $10K investment every 24 months on a new GPU . . .

I have been renting GPU resources and running open weight models, but recently my preferred provider simply doesn't have hardware available. I'm now kicking myself a little for not simply making a big purchase last fall when prices were better.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#340

Post by antisthenes »

upofadown wrote: post #93

This article inspired me to look and see what this computer is. Apparently it is a "AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 250 Processor" from 2009. So 17 years old. It has 8 GB of DDR3 memory and runs at 3 GHz. It currently has OpenBSD on it, but at least one source thinks it could run Windows 10. The fact that I didn't know any of this is what is significant here. At some point I stopped caring about this sort of thing. It really do…

Did any of the components fail over time?

HDD/SSD?

Pretty surprising to have this thing still be working 17 years later, unless it spent a good chunk of that in 'cold storage'.

Post reply on HN