[beachy]

AWS and Azure would slit their own throats before they created a way for their customers to pool instances to save money.

They want to do that themselves, and keep the customer relationship and the profits, instead of giving them to a middleman or the customer.

[jiggawatts]

It’s just corporate profits combined with market forces, not a some sort of malicious conspiracy.

You can rent a 2-socket AMD server with 120 available cores and RDMA for something like 50c to $2 per hour. That’s just barely above the cost of the electricity and cooling!

What do you want, free compute just handed to you out of the goodness of their hearts?

There is incredible demand for high-end GPUs right now, and market prices reflect that.

[beachy]

You mentioned malicious conspiracy, not me.

It's just business and I'd do the same if I was in charge of AWS.

[alex_lav]

> You can rent a 2-socket AMD server with 120 available cores and RDMA for something like 50c to $2 per hour.

Source required

[jiggawatts]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36950422

[mikeravkine]

Sorry where are these .50c many core servers you speak of exactly?

[jiggawatts]

Azure's HB120rs_v3 size is about 36c per hour right now with Spot pricing in East US. These use 3rd generation AMD EPYC "Milan" processors.

The instances with the 4th generation "Genoa-X" processors (HB176rs_v4) cost about $2.88 per hour. The HX176rs_v4 model with 1.7 TB of memory is $3.46 per hour.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/hbv...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/hbv...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/hx-...

[alex_lav]

Are these actually attainable, as in I can log in and launch an instances with these specifications right now, or are they just listings? I ask because literally last week I was unable to launch similar instances on AWS despite those specs being listed as available and online.

[jiggawatts]

I could. Availability tends to be region-dependent with all clouds.

[megakwood]

Where can you get 120 cores for $2/hr?

[jiggawatts]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36950422

[asdfaoeu]

AWS and Azure both charge by the hour anyway so it wouldn't but if you wanted you could use Reserved instances and just have their accounts in the same organisation.

A large part of the profit comes from the upfront risk of buying machines. With this you are just absorbing that risk which may be better if the startup expects to last.