Today's tech echoes 1960-1970 mainframe era: very centralized around a handful of companies controlling "massive cloud compute" in bespoke mainframe-like topology.
All of that will all be legacy in a couple of years. Today's B200 clusters are tomorrow's e-waste. Decentralization might happen gradually or abruptly. But to me it's obvious that we'll be thinking of high-tech tensor processors and GPUs the way we thought of individual transistors and tube amplifiers in the 1980s.
If AI turns out to be the revolution it purports to be, than the underlying hardware will change much more rapidly than it did with ICs and microprocessors in the late 1970s. Today's hot is tomorrow's junk.
Hardware depreciation timescales are actually getting longer, not shorter, because frontier hardware like B200 clusters is highly bottlenecked. It's not just a RAMpocalypse out there, we're seeing early signs of production bottlenecks with GPUs and maybe even CPUs.
One thing that is potentially different this time is that Moore's Law has stopped scaling. Computers aren't getting smaller exponentially. They're getting bigger with multiple chips glued together to make up for Moore's Law.
It's basically converted sand. Most of that conversion happens in Taiwan at the moment. Which is considered, by China, to be one of their provinces and as a protectorate by the usa. Hence the interest in that region....
Mainland China is growing its own RAM manufacturing capacity. They are too tiny to make a real dent into the RAMpocalypse yet but this can potentially change.
Today's tech echoes 1960-1970 mainframe era: very centralized around a handful of companies controlling "massive cloud compute" in bespoke mainframe-like topology.
All of that will all be legacy in a couple of years. Today's B200 clusters are tomorrow's e-waste. Decentralization might happen gradually or abruptly. But to me it's obvious that we'll be thinking of high-tech tensor processors and GPUs the way we thought of individual transistors and tube amplifiers in the 1980s.
If AI turns out to be the revolution it purports to be, than the underlying hardware will change much more rapidly than it did with ICs and microprocessors in the late 1970s. Today's hot is tomorrow's junk.
> Today's B200 clusters are tomorrow's e-waste.
Hardware depreciation timescales are actually getting longer, not shorter, because frontier hardware like B200 clusters is highly bottlenecked. It's not just a RAMpocalypse out there, we're seeing early signs of production bottlenecks with GPUs and maybe even CPUs.
One thing that is potentially different this time is that Moore's Law has stopped scaling. Computers aren't getting smaller exponentially. They're getting bigger with multiple chips glued together to make up for Moore's Law.
...But there's a new world dawning for photonic chips.
No reason to expect Moore's observation to apply there (though, maybe?), but it will have big implications for power usage.
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It's basically converted sand. Most of that conversion happens in Taiwan at the moment. Which is considered, by China, to be one of their provinces and as a protectorate by the usa. Hence the interest in that region....
Everyone is expecting them to invade Taiwan, but why not merely extort Taiwan?
You mean by contributing to RAMpocalypse the mainland incentives the west to build own fabs, making Taiwan expendable for us someday?
Mainland China is growing its own RAM manufacturing capacity. They are too tiny to make a real dent into the RAMpocalypse yet but this can potentially change.