Comment by xigency

14 days ago

Not a hoarder per-se but I bought a 24GB card on the secondary market. My privacy is valuable. I'm okay being a half-step or full-step behind in LLM or image diffusion if it means my data never leaves my machine.

If you really were serious about privacy, you wouldn't put yourself at disadvantage with a locked-down six-year out of date card. Tenstorrent Blackhole exists now, btw.

  • Be serious now. Plenty of useful, privacy-required queries can be run with 24GB of VRAM, especially given the existence of e.g. Gemma 3 27B and the heavy NVIDIA-targeted optimisation work that has occurred.

    The Tenstorrent cards exist, but are low in availability and the software is comparatively nonexistent. I'm excited for them too, but at the end of the day, I can buy a used 3090 today and do useful work with it, while the same is not true of TT yet.

  • I think it's disingenuous to suggest they're putting themselves at a disadvantage with an RTX 3090, especially in a comparison to an inferior product that isn't even shipping yet.

    RTX 3090: 24GB RAM, 936.2GB/s bandwidth

    Tenstorrent p150a: 32GB RAM, 512GB/s bandwidth

    an extra 8GB of ram isn't worth nearly halving memory bandwidth.