[nickdothutton]

I was there in the middle of the dotcom crash and the telecoms crash which was much worse. Fiber does not rust, and while there was vast overcapacity, not all of it was lit, or indeed worth lighting. 10 years after, thanks to DWDM there were 8 strand cables where only 2 strands were lit, albeit with many more wavelengths than envisaged before. Even though demand had grown.

How much is a 10 year old GPU worth? Where is the “dwdm but for GPUs?”.

There truly are interesting times and we have the benefit of being in them.

[keeda]

Just so I understand correctly, you mean that with DWDM 2 strands of cables were equivalent to 8 since DWDM as a multiplexing technology increased the capacity of each fiber, right?

> How much is a 10 year old GPU worth? Where is the “dwdm but for GPUs?”.

From other sources cited in TFA it seems GPUs won't last 3 years, let alone 10! But I think we know what the "DWDM for GPUs" is -- it's the processing efficiency gains that we've seen over the last few years which keeps driving the per-token prices sharply down.

[nickdothutton]

I'm not sure where DWDM is currently, but we quickly went from 1 colour to 512 colours per strand. I expect and hope for increases in GPU performance, some via process shrink, some via wafer size/yield, and some...perhaps... by software efficiencies (most interesting to me). Maybe volumes will increase too, further driving down the price for essentially the same parts. However I don't see how these gains (if they happen) can "get us to 512".