Comment by trenchpilgrim
17 hours ago
No they don't. 5-8 years is common. The source for the 3 year number is an unnamed random person claiming to be a Google engineer, and Google specifically reached out to all the journalists publishing that claim with this response.
> Recent purported comments about Nvidia GPU hardware utilization and service life expressed by an “unnamed source” were inaccurate, do not represent how we utilize Nvidia’s technology, and do not represent our experience.
Data centers might be, GPUs not really. No one needs GPUs from 8 years, and hardly even 5.
If GPU demand growth continues to outpace GPU production growth, that is necessarily going to change. Older GPUs may not be cost competitive to operate with newer GPUs, but when the alternative is no GPU...
A100s are over 5 years old and still widely used for HPC. 8 year old V100s are still available on cloud providers for low-intensity workloads.
It dropped down, but is now being extended to 5 years.
The 3 year number was reported by the FT this year from a bunch of companies, where they were saying their accountants are extending to 5 years.
Another example, MS just moved from 4 years to 5.
You are confusing depreciation (which is mostly driven by tax reasons) with service lifecycle.
And you're confusing all of these terms. The "3 years" is the standard warranty and typically gets extended to 5 years (and maybe 7 or 8 depending on the vendor). This is consistent with Dell PowerEdge, HP ProLiant, etc. servers. Nvidia GPUs on the other hand...there likely could be different terms, but idk because they are not typical purchases for 95% of the companies who make server hardware purchases.
Source - I regularly work with IT departments and review their contracts as part of diligence.
4 replies →
A lot of these tax codes were written when computers were outdated within a year. The turnover of computers slowed a lot in the last two decades, but the tax codes haven’t changed.