Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by freemint 1413 days ago
WOW, unless i have a mistake in my math there is a 90% profit margin. A 3090 has 650ish octabench score.[1] I can get a 3090 for $0.162/hr at vast.ai (ok it's the cheapest one). 0.162/651.95 = 0.00024848531 << $0.0019 pricing taken from https://portal.rentaflop.com/pricing

Am i missing something?

[1] https://render.otoy.com/octanebench/summary_detail_item.php?...

1 comments

Yes, you're missing the part where that instance has

1. Garbage internet speeds (~20Mbps symmetrical)

2. 97% reliability (which, if I understand correctly, means a 3% chance of your task just randomly getting dropped part way through)

3. An ancient CPU (admittedly, it was really good in 2014)

The next cheapest 3090 is about 25% more expensive, and the next after that another 25% - presumably rentaflop has more than 1 customer at a time. Within about 10-15 GPUs on vast.ai the price is literally double. And of course, you're paying for the convenience of them just doing the render for you, rather than having to deal with getting dropped in a docker container.