Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by euroderf 199 days ago
Free GPUs for everyone! Bring a truck!
1 comments

I honestly can't wait to use used gpus as lego bricks similar to what kids in Weimar republic did with cash
My self-training robot army is poised to conquer all. It's merely waiting for parts.
Never gonna happen. Cash has no intrinsic value exccept maybe for use in fire / toiler paper. GPUs while currently inflated in price will always find enough value. Their price might go down 50-75% but never 99%
I've got an S3 VGA adapter to sell you at 25% of list price
They're taking about shorter time scales, the effect on top of the normal obsolescence treadmill.
> GPUs while currently inflated in price will always find enough value.

What is the instrinsic value of one of millions of GPUs, if the world only needs 15-20% of them?

About fifty teraflops.

That's the meaning of intrinsic calor - the device can do what it can do, regardless of market conditions. Today it has the value of fifty teraflops, and tomorrow it still does, unless it breaks. However, intrinsic value cannot be measured in dollars.

"calor" was a typo of "value" obviously.
And yet we're talking about electronics here, they don't have sentimental value and just because compute capacity is unused there are no guarantees that it will be used, even at a per unit cost approaching €0.

I'm sure that farmers during the Great Depression were also consoling themselves with the "intrisinsic caloric value" of their corn.

As I said, the intrinsic value of a GPU is not measured in €. In fact, the lower the sale price gets, the better a deal it is, not worse - you get the same intrinsic value for less extrinsic cost.

There are also intrinsic costs, mostly power consumption.

Demand for GPU power is much more elastic than demand for food calories.
The most likely outcome is kids in third world countries extracting the valuable metals from piles of discarded GPUs.
After GPU crypto mining became unprofitable Chinese manufacturers took "mining only" cards, desoldered the GPU and built new graphics cards using the chips. So at least the lower end stuff (RTX6000) could be repurposed like that.
Soon you will bring a wheelbarrow of GPUs to buy a loaf of bread.