Comment by mikkupikku
21 hours ago
If a taxi company did that every year, they'd be losing a lot of money. Of course new cars and cards are cheaper to operate than old ones, but is that difference enough to offset buying a new one every one to three years?
>If a taxi company did that every year, they'd be losing a lot of money. Of course new cars and cards are cheaper to operate than old ones, but is that difference enough to offset buying a new one every one to three years?
That's where the analogy breaks. There are massive efficiency gains from new process nodes, which new GPUs use. Efficiency improvements for cars are glacial, aside from "breakthroughs" like hybrid/EV cars.
>offset buying a new one every one to three years?
Isn't that precisely how leasing works? Also, don't companies prefer not to own hardware for tax purposes? I've worked for several places where they leased compute equipment with upgrades coming at the end of each lease.
Who wants to buy GPUs that were redlined for three years in a data center? Maybe there's a market for those, but most people already seem wary of lightly used GPUs from other consumers, let alone GPUs that were burning in a crypto farm or AI data center for years.
> Who wants to buy
who cares? that's the beauty of the lease. once it's over, the old and busted gets replaced with new and shiny. what the leasing company does is up to them. it becomes one of those YP not an MP situations with deprecated equipment.
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Depends on the price, of course. I'm wary of paying 50% of new for something run hard 3 years. Seems an NVIDIA H100 is going for $20k+ on EBay. I'm not taking that risk.
Depending on the discount, a lot of people.
That works either because someone wants to buy old hardware for the manufacturer/lessor, or because the hardware is EOL in 3 years but it's easier to let the lessor deal with recyling / valuable parts recovery.
If your competitor refreshes their cards and you dont, they will win on margin.
You kind of have to.
Not necessarily if you count capital costs vs operating costs/margins.
Replacing cars every 3 years vs a couple % in efficiency is not an obvious trade off. Especially if you can do it in 5 years instead of 3.
You highlight the exact dilemma.
Company A has taxis that are 5 percent less efficient and for the reasons you stated doesn't want to upgrade.
Company B just bought new taxis, and they are undercutting company A by 5 percent while paying their drivers the same.
Company A is no longer competitive.
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You can sell the old, less efficient GPUs to folks who will be running them with markedly lower duty cycles (so, less emphasis on direct operational costs), e.g. for on-prem inference or even just typical workstation/consumer use. It ends up being a win-win trade.
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If there was a new taxi every other year that could handle twice as many fares, they might. That’s not how taxis work but that is how chips work.