[torginus]

I mean, every year or so there's a new NVIDIA GPU, making last years models obsolete and GPUs from 2 generations back essentially landfill. I don't think there's another large-scale investment that decays at this rate.

The infrastructure being there might also be a problem.

- If there's no breakthrough, and we're only going to make incremental gains, then its wasteful

- If there's a breakthrough, it might turn out a new AI architecture needs either lot less compute, or a different kind of it

[deepsquirrelnet]

> I mean, every year or so there's a new NVIDIA GPU, making last years models obsolete and GPUs from 2 generations back essentially landfill. I don't think there's another large-scale investment that decays at this rate.

Ampere generation A6000’s are still selling used for close to MSRP on eBay. I bought an A4500, used it for a year and then sold it for MORE than I bought it for.

I’ve never seen computer hardware appreciate in value like it is now, even if new cards are still significant upgrades.

[kldg]

Yeah, I think it's pretty messy. I bought some keplers a year ago (far below MSRP), and they are fine -- but the trouble becomes software support; sort of like tablets/phones where the hardware's still more than enough, but because software stops supporting it, the landfill becomes landfilled -- excepting those people willing to set up the very specific environments where there's still use in them -- and to that end, obviously the things're more than a decade old, but hardly useless, though it would be fair to say most people would not run them.

If you can keep up software support, the hardware becomes much more valuable both now and later, but this is much harder to do in the consumer space where the software than in the industrial/AI space; I'd say the majority of my PC replacements until I was established financially were the result of software not supporting my hardware (not that it couldn't do the task if there were support, but simply that there was no support), and I should say, too, that in almost every case, I regretted dumping $1k in today-dollars for a single game or application otherwise.

Obviously, the problem's much worse with phones/tablets where most people use them for Cloud activities; people use them for 2-3 years and they go in the trash or their service provider might buy it back essentially as e-waste to be scrapped (despite marketing implications of them being reused to help surgeons in Africa).

[magicteam]

This because of AI hype/demand, not a general rule...