Comment by dmlittle
2 months ago
It's worth noting that GPUs have a much higher failure rate than traditional CPUs. Over 10x the failure rate due thermal stress. The amount of heat generated is very different. You can't really replace a GPU in a satellite (at least today?) which would place most of these satellites as space debris in a ~5 year horizon.
Usually satellites utilize an older node as newer nodes are easily bit-flipped by radiation. And blocking radiation is heavy.
AI calcs may handle wrong calculations better than cpus where software will tend to panic.
Which is the same lifetime as a starlink sat
So what exactly is the benefit of having that thing in orbit then, where it costs you millions of dollars to put it there?
Self destruction is a feature, not a bug.
That said eventually they can be lifted to higher orbits and have robots deliver and swap updated compute (if not made in space itself!).
The current bottleneck on compute is power and zoning. Solar panels are 5x more efficient in space, and there is no zoning in space.
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Millions of dollars? Where did you get that number from?
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