alt Hacker NewsNormally you'd replace the device because there is more power efficient one on the market so running one at current energy prices costs more than buying new, more power efficient one and saving power.
IF prices of GPU/RAM come back to pre bubble costs, we might see the 5 year cycle of replacement that's relatively common in normal datacenters pre-ai bubble.
At current prices ? those GPUs that are there now will be running there in 10 years still.
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> At current prices ? those GPUs that are there now will be running there in 10 years still.
If they don't burn out after two or three. Annualized failure rates are about 9% according to Meta.
A quarter will have failed within three years. Less than half of the original hardware will be running after ten years. In both cases if you assume that rate does not increase over time. Do H100s come with replacement guarantees?
I'm of two minds on this issue. Off the cuff I agree, but then again where are all the used "enterprise" GPUs coming from right now? There's plenty of secondary market for used Telas K, M and V series GPUs right now and the V100 is only 9ish years old, and that only if you bought it on the release day.
I do agree that 5 years isn't the hard cutoff I was suggesting but I'm not convinced that 10 years is a reasonable timeframe to consider paying the debt down when Moore's Law is involved. I know it's no longer the 12-18mo doubling it used to be but even if it's 2ish years then over 6 years you get 3 doublings or 8x performance gains. At 10 years it's another 2 doublings or 32x performance gains. It's hard for linear payback curves to deal with exponential performance curves past 2-3 doublings.