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A 10 year old Xeon is all you need

point.free

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Re: A 10 year old Xeon is all you need

#72
post #46
post #31

What intrigues me the most about AI progress, is not AGI or the model du jour by $AI_UNICORN, but rather what can be run locally. I remember having an amusing, but rather useless model in a beefy gaming PC that I had 6 years ago; and now, something that’s a hundred times better on my M5 laptop. Should the market react to the memory shortage, the progress of the Apple silicon continue at the same pace, and what we’ll…

Things you are not supposed to talk about: - There is no "moat" (lasting, easy-to-defend technological edge) in AI model businesses. There are just short-term advantages. - An AI business is a capital-intensive business, just like old factories. Data centers are expensive, models are energy-hungry, and the hardware inside must be replaced every 3–4 years. - Smaller, specialized models eat margins from below. Transcri…

All true.

It does seem like the structural characteristics we’ve observed so far suggest there is a kind of flywheel from short-term to long-term advantage due to the capital requirements at various levels.

If you’re Nvidia, making the best GPUs today, the expanding wavefront of demand is consuming them with volume and margins to give you a huge edge in building out the best next generation of GPUs. Similar to how the mobile wave gave TSMC sustained advantage for about a decade now.

I’m guessing this is also what we’re seeing as Anthropic and OpenAI swap spots in the token-vendor market.

Re: A 10 year old Xeon is all you need

#73

The E5-2620 v4 is great. Have been using it for 10 years now. Wanted to upgrade until I saw current prices. I have 64 GB ddr4. Paired it with rx 9060 xt 16 GB and games run as fast as ever. Perhaps the cpu is a slight bottleneck in DOOM The Dark Ages, but i'm at 60 fps, so no problem. Light llm on the gpu is a nobrainer, and it's cool to see that things can be tuned to run ok on the cpu. I bought 2667 v4 a month ago…

> The E5-2620 v4 is great. Have been using it for 10 years now. 10 years? Damn, that is a long time. I always assumed that heat-induced damage will kill a CPU after a certain amount of time (5-7 years). Am I wrong here? I assume yes. Or are CPUs must stronger/tougher than the bad old days?

A quick search on Xeon production yields that it goes through a rather rigorous testing. I wouldn't be surprised that server cpu's in a desktop pc works longer. I can't overclock it either, and that probably helps with its lifespan as well. But yeah, the fact that it actually powers on when i click the button and isn't a limiting factor after 10 years is quite something.

Re: A 10 year old Xeon is all you need

#74
post #41
post #31

What intrigues me the most about AI progress, is not AGI or the model du jour by $AI_UNICORN, but rather what can be run locally. I remember having an amusing, but rather useless model in a beefy gaming PC that I had 6 years ago; and now, something that’s a hundred times better on my M5 laptop. Should the market react to the memory shortage, the progress of the Apple silicon continue at the same pace, and what we’ll…

Its a convenience thing. You can run a whole lot of stuff locally from wikipedia to social media/email/video servers whatever. Most people with a full time job and 2 kids dont do it cause who has time and energy to patch and maintain the ever growing complexity of this stuff. These systems will keep growing complex. That also means more bugs. Age old tradeoff between freedom and convenience.

[dead]

Re: A 10 year old Xeon is all you need

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The E5-2620 v4 is great. Have been using it for 10 years now. 10 years? Damn, that is a long time. I always assumed that heat-induced damage will kill a CPU after a certain amount of time (5-7 years). Am I wrong here? I assume yes. Or are CPUs must stronger/tougher than the bad old days?

A quick search on Xeon production yields that it goes through a rather rigorous testing. I wouldn't be surprised that server cpu's in a desktop pc works longer. I can't overclock it either, and that probably helps with its lifespan as well. But yeah, the fact that it actually powers on when i click the button and isn't a limiting factor after 10 years is quite something.

Back from my old overclocking days - its heat that kills life. And if you keep that under control (what ages is the heatpaste, replace it ever so often) i very much doubt you'll have any life issues from the cpu itself.

Bearings in fans, caps etc. are also stuff that you need to keep an eye on.

I just replaced a i5-660 thats been powered on since 2010 24/7, heatpaste was fucked so it crashed during heavy loads :)

Re: A 10 year old Xeon is all you need

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sure you got DDR3 .. I have 2 e5 v4 rigs at home and both have ddr4 ... Unless I am wrong and 2011-3 supports ddr3 and ddr4

The first two generations supported DDR3 only. Haswell and Broadwell (v4) brought DDR4 support.

right, and they talk about "v4" which is DDR4.

Re: A 10 year old Xeon is all you need

#79
post #53
post #22

Might consider going for even older CPUs which don't have the Intel ME ring -3 thing which is full of backdoors

I appreciate the downvotes without any reasoning. It's a fact that newer Intel CPUs have Intel ME which was not in older CPUs and significantly increases attack surface if you are not living in a five eyes state.

I agree with the first part. I think this article by FSF about Intel's ME summarizes the issue https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/blogs/Intel_ME_Carikli_article_...

As for the second part, I am not sure about how living in a five eyes state would mitigate it. What do you mean by that?

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