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I am still a little skeptical about utilisation rates. If demand is so extreme, wouldn't we see rental prices for H100/A100 prices go up or maintain? Wouldn't the cost for such a gpu still be high (you can get em 3k used).


On "runpod community cloud" renting a 5090 costs $0.69/hour [1] and it consumes about $0.10/hour electricity, if running at full power and paying $0.20/kWh.

On Amazon, buying a 5090 costs $3000 [2]

That's a payback time of 212 days. And Runpod is one of the cheaper cloud providers; for the GPUs I compared, EC2 was twice the price for an on-demand instance.

Rental prices for GPUs are pretty darn high.

[1] https://www.runpod.io/pricing [2] https://www.amazon.com/GIGABYTE-Graphics-WINDFORCE-GV-N5090G...


A 5090 gaming card is a different beast to the 80gb ai cards. That one was 40k usd so for renting that to hit 1.50 dollar per hour is interesting.


The defacto install of github CLI on ubuntu systems appears to be snap which is owned by some random dude...


There is AMD's onload https://github.com/Xilinx-CNS/onload. It works with Solarflare, Xilinx but also generic NIC support via AF_XDP.


The price of doing that is losing OS controls over emitted packets. For servers fine. Browsers not so much.


General consensus on that case seems to be they picked a budget motherboard and skimped on the cooler.


That ASUS motherboard is far from the cheapest available. If using it makes the user liable for failure, a large part of the market is unsuitable.

For both the cooler and the motherboard, AMD have too much control to look the other way. The chip can measure its own temperature and the conceit of undermining partners by moving things on chip and controlling more of the ecosystem is that things perform better. They should at least perform.


The cpu is what a 9950x whilst paired with one of the cheapest asus motherboards with underpowered VRMs according to games nexus, hardware unboxed.

The cooler was under the rated tdp of the platform. That and it lasted 6 months and so far seemed the only case of it falling over like it did.

Yea am leaning on it being user error.


Am curious if the problem impacts m4 given it came out after this was released and disclosed.

That and it moved to Arm’s 9.2 instructions.


Keep in mind that it takes at least 3 months to produce an M4, and the design has been finalized long before that. So most likely yes


Yes.


The biggest discussion I have been on having this is the implications on Deepseek for say the RoI H100. Will a sudden spike in available GPUs and reduction in demand (from efficient GPU usage) dramatically shock the cost per hour to rent a GPU. This I think is the critical value for measuring the investment value for Blackwell now.

The price for a H100 per hour has gone from the peak of $8.42 to about $1.80.

A H100 consumes 700W, lets say $0.10 per kwh?

A H100 costs around $30000.

Given deepseek, can the price of this drop further given a much larger supply of available GPUs can now be proven to be unlocked (Mi300x, H200s, H800s etc...).

Now that LLMs have effectively become commodity, with a significant price floor, is this new value ahead of what is profitable for the card.

Given the new Blackwell is $70000, is there sufficient applications that enable customers to get a RoI on the new card?

Am curious about this as I think I am currently ignorant of the types of applications that businesses can use to outweigh the costs. I predict that the cost per hour of the GPU dropping such that it isn't such a no-brainer investment compared to previously. Especially if it is now possible to unlock potential from much older platforms running at lower electricity rates.


Why is there this implicit assumption that more efficient training/inference will reduce GPU demand? It seems more likely - based on historical precedent in the computing industry - that demand will expand to fill the available hardware.

We can do more inference and more training on fewer GPUs. That doesn’t mean we need to stop buying GPUs. Unless people think we’re already doing the most training/inference we’ll ever need to do…

“640KB ought to be enough for anybody.”


Historically most compute went to run games in peoples homes, because companies didn't see a need to run that much analytics. I don't see why that wouldn't happen now as well, there is a limit to how much value you can get out of this, since they aren't AGI yet.


This just seems like a very bold statement to make in the first two years of LLMs. There are so many workflows where they are either not yet embedded at all, or only involved in a limited capacity. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the areas for growth. And that’s before even considering the growth in adoption. I think it’s a safe bet that LLM usage will proliferate in terms of both number of users, and number of inferences per user. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that growth is exponential on both those dimensions.


> This just seems like a very bold statement to make in the first two years of LLMs

GPT-3 is 5 years old, this tech has been looking for a problem to solve for a really long time now. Many billions has already been burned trying to find a viable business model for these, and so far nothing has been found that warrants anything even close to multi trillion dollar valuations.

Even when the product is free people don't use ChatGPT that much, making things cheaper will just reduce the demand for compute then.


Everyone uses chatgpt now. You too. Hundreds of time per day.

It's just not called chatgpt. Instead it is at the top of every Google search you do. Same technology.

It has basically replaced search for most people. A massive industry turned over in 5 years by a totally new technology.

Funny how the tech took over so completely it blends into the background to the point where you think it doesn't exist.


> It has basically replaced search for most people.

Not because it's better than search was, though.

They lost the spam battle, and internally lost the "ads should be distinct" battle, and now search sucks. It'll happen to the AI models soon enough; I fully expect to be able to buy responses for questions like "what's the best 27" monitor?" via Google AdWords.


Using it doesn't mean people like it. It's forced on us. See recent stories about Microsoft.


Over the long run maybe, but for the next 2 years the market will struggle to find a use for all this possible extra gpus. There is no real consumer demand for AI products and lots of backlash whenever implemented eg: that Coca Cola ad. It's going to be a big hit to demand in the short to medium term as the hyperscalers cut back/reasses.


There's no consumer demand for AI?

In a thread full of people who have no idea what they're talking about either from the ML side or the finance side, this is the worst take here.

OpenAI alone reports hundreds of millions of MAU. That's before we talk about all of the other players. Before we talk about the immense demand in media like Hollywood and games.

Heck there's an entire new entertainment industry forming with things like character ai having more than 20M MAU. Midjourney has about the same.

Definitely. An industry in its infancy that already has hundreds of millions of MAU across of it shows that there's zero demand because of some ad no one has seen.


Seems like your reasoning for how the next 2 years will go is a little slanted. And everyone in this thread is neglecting any demand issues stemming from market cycles.


Could even argue that the price should go up, since the amount of with one GPU can do and its potential ROI just increased


I think training demand is what you might predict would plummet.

Inference demand might increase but you could easily believe that there’s substantial inelasticity currently.


It should be trivially easy to reproduce the results no? Just need to wait for one of the giant companies with many times the GPUs to reproduce the results.

I don't expect a #180 AUM hedgefund to have as many GPUs than meta, msft or Google.


AUM isn't a good proxy for quantitative hedge fund performance, many strategies are quite profitable and don't scale with AUM. For what it's worth, they seemed to have some excellent returns for many years for any market, let alone the difficult Chinese markets.


I think there can be a difference here.

Was looking recently at the power requirements of an amp + subwoofer + 5 5.1 JBL surround speakers.

The setup was done decade ago, and the power needed for it was nuts. Something like 500W for a Denon amp and 250W for a JBL subwoofer?

For reference something like a OG HomePod consumes what 45W? The Sony srs xg500 boombox can last 30hours and is a giant room shaking boombox.

The difference in power efficiency between these old and new setups are nuts. Nevermind compatibility with AirPlay, streaming etc…


> 500W

Amplifiers are quoted in peak output, not average (and play some games with other parameters e.g. resistance) to capture bigger-number-better sales. A 750w system will consume nowhere near 750w at typical listening volumes (just like your 750w PC doesn't use 18 kWh every day.)


Unless you’re playing REALLY loud, I don’t think you are anywhere near 250 or 500W of consumption. I would guess it is the maximum rated power?

Even with quite old and inefficient amp + speaker combo, 30W of sound is usually a lot(!).

Tube amps are an exception. They can be very power hungry, but it’s difficult to buy such tech today compared to class D etc.


There's also an absolutely massive difference in audio quality between a HomePod or Sonos anything and a proper amp + speakers.


Yup. Newer products use various tricks to try to fill in the gaps that their physical reality can't overcome, but ultimately there's no getting around that reality.

I will say that the Sony upright boom boxes aren't to be slept on (and, if one is active, fat chance). They're quite good for their intended use cases (parties, and closed Best Buys during clean-up/inventory).


A 500W amp is probably a class A and can't really be made more efficient. It would still be 500W in 2024. Decades ago there were more efficient setups too, though of course now they sound better and also have lots more features and connectivity.


Surely this is an issue for there not being an easy mechanism for backing up?

The proper solution should be secure by design and user friendly. We shouldn’t compromise the former for the latter.


What is being asked for already exists? It is called Onload.

https://github.com/Xilinx-CNS/onload


it is my understanding that io_uring is the generalized open source implementation of this, although i do not think it bypasses the kernel fib trie like openonload does...


Aside for onload being open source, not really. AF_XDP is the generalized, hardware agnostic, version of kernel bypass.

In addition to bypass onload also provides a full IP/TCP user space stack and non-intrusive support for existing binaries using the standard BSD socket interface (incidentally onload also supports XDP now).

io_uring is really for asynchronous communication with the kernel.


interesting, didn't know that the networking stack had ring buffer infrastructure as well. (i don't think this af_xdp stuff existed when i was in this world)

the fib trie is the core of the ip stack - i was using it as proxy for total ip stack bypass.


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