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points by andy_ppp 4 days ago | 0 comments

I just can't believe the price of hardware these days, a 3090, a graphics card released in September 2020, can still be worth £1500 or more. Honestly everywhere is sold out below around £1800. Can you really trust them not to have been rinsed on eBay and have an extremely short usage - they are still around £1150 used there!

[–] PaulKeeble 4 days ago

We need a step change in the amount of silicon chips produced. This situation has been going on now for over 2 decades, initially bitcoin but ever since various high compute scenarios keep causing GPU shortages and now RAM and storage as well. This one isn't likely to go away anytime soon so we need a drastic increase in production to bring pricing down to reasonable levels.

[–] DanielHB 4 days ago

It is not going away any time soon, but when it does it will be sudden and have a massive drop in demand.

It was pure coincidence that the AI-craze neatly followed the crypto-craze (many neo-clouds in the AI space were originally crypto miners).

[–] montagg 4 days ago

Not exactly a coincidence. You don’t get an AI craze without wide availability of GPUs for training. Not for a much longer time.

[–] DanielHB 4 days ago

I dunno, I always thought the AI craze started from ChatGPT which, in turn, was mostly driven by Google research papers.

Yes it would have costed them more to train the first few versions of ChatGPT if it wasn't for the crypto mayham, but it would still happen. The hardware was always available and still improving regardless of crypto or not.

[–] aquentinn 3 days ago

Yeah of course it would have eventually happened but the GPU demand in crypto speeded it up, that's from Sergey Brin himself: https://www.trustnodes.com/2018/04/29/googles-founder-says-t...