[layoric]

> Unlike railroads and fibre, all the best compute in 2025 will be lacklustre in 2027.

I definitely don't think compute is anything like railroads and fibre, but I'm not so sure compute will continue it's efficiency gains of the past. Power consumption for these chips is climbing fast, lots of gains are from better hardware support for 8bit/4bit precision, I believe yields are getting harder to achieve as things get much smaller.

Betting against compute getting better/cheaper/faster is probably a bad idea, but fundamental improvements I think will be a lot slower over the next decade as shrinking gets a lot harder.

[palmotea]

>> Unlike railroads and fibre, all the best compute in 2025 will be lacklustre in 2027.

> I definitely don't think compute is anything like railroads and fibre, but I'm not so sure compute will continue it's efficiency gains of the past. Power consumption for these chips is climbing fast, lots of gains are from better hardware support for 8bit/4bit precision, I believe yields are getting harder to achieve as things get much smaller.

I'm no expert, buy my understanding is that as feature sizes shrink, semiconductors become more prone to failure over time. Those GPUs probably aren't going to all fry themselves in two years, but even if GPUs stagnate, chip longevity may limit the medium/long term value of the (massive) investment.

[spiderice]

Unfortunately changing 2027 to 2030 doesn't make the math much better

[JumpCrisscross]

> changing 2027 to 2030 doesn't make the math much better

Could you show me?

Early turbines didn't last that long. Even modern ones are only rated for a few decades.

[skywhopper]

Unfortunately the chips themselves probably won’t physically last much longer than that under the workloads they are being put to. So, yes, they won’t be totally obsolete as technology in 2028, but they may still have to be replaced.

[munk-a]

Yeah - I think that the extremely fast depreciation just due to wear and use on GPUs is pretty unappreciated right now. So you've spent 300 mil on a brand new data center - congrats - you'll need to pay off that loan and somehow raise another 100 mil to actually maintain that capacity for three years based on chip replacement alone.

There is an absolute glut of cheap compute available right now due to VC and other funds dumping into the industry (take advantage of it while it exists!) but I'm pretty sure Wall St. will balk when they realize the continued costs of maintaining that compute and look at the revenue that expenditure is generating. People think of chips as a piece of infrastructure - you buy a personal computer and it'll keep chugging for a decade without issue in most case - but GPUs are essentially consumables - they're an input to producing the compute a data center sells that needs constant restocking - rather than a one-time investment.

[chermi]

Do we actually know how they're degrading? Are there still Pascals out there? If not, is it because they actual broke or because of poor performance? I understand it's tempting to say near 100% workload for multiple years = fast degradation, but what are the actual stats? Are you talking specifically about the actual compute chip or the whole compute system -- I know there's a big difference now with the systems Nvidia is selling. How long do typical Intel/AMD CPU server chips last? My impression is a long time.

If we're talking about the whole compute system like a gb200, is there a particular component that breaks first? How hard are they to refurbish, if that particular component breaks? I'm guessing they didn't have repairability in mind, but I also know these "chips" are much more than chips now so there's probably some modularity if it's not the chip itself failing.

[epolanski]

I'm not sure.

Number of cycles that goes through silicon matters, but what matters most really are temperature and electrical shocks.

If the GPUs are stable, at low temperature they can be at full load for years. There are servers out there up from decades and decades.