[dmlittle]

It's worth noting that GPUs have a much higher failure rate than traditional CPUs. Over 10x the failure rate due thermal stress. The amount of heat generated is very different. You can't really replace a GPU in a satellite (at least today?) which would place most of these satellites as space debris in a ~5 year horizon.

[sroussey]

Usually satellites utilize an older node as newer nodes are easily bit-flipped by radiation. And blocking radiation is heavy.

AI calcs may handle wrong calculations better than cpus where software will tend to panic.

[lijok]

Which is the same lifetime as a starlink sat

[gambiting]

So what exactly is the benefit of having that thing in orbit then, where it costs you millions of dollars to put it there?

[dzhiurgis]

Self destruction is a feature, not a bug.

That said eventually they can be lifted to higher orbits and have robots deliver and swap updated compute (if not made in space itself!).

[Footnote7341]

The current bottleneck on compute is power and zoning. Solar panels are 5x more efficient in space, and there is no zoning in space.

[jsnell]

The current bottleneck is silicon. Every chip that is manufactured gets housed and powered. (It makes sense: the cost of compute is dominated by capex, the power costs are irrelevant, so they're ok paying a premium for power).

The space data center hypothesis relies on compute supply growing faster than power supply. (Both are bottlenecked on parts of the supply chain that will take ages to scale.)

Even if you believe that's the case, the point at which orbital data centers start making sense is incredibly sensitive to the exact growth rates.

[lijok]

The current bottleneck is not silicon. There is plenty of silicon locked up in previous gen GPUs that are no longer efficient enough to run relative to newer models. The bottleneck is the economics of owning the older GPU models - which is why all the GPU neoclouds are gonna go bust unless they can get customers to continue renting old GPUs.

The economics are vastly different when opex is near zero for these things

[jsnell]

All of that is incorrect.

H100 rental prices are still as high as when the cards were brand new. The prices vastly exceed the power costs.

In a world where power or DC permits are the current bottleneck those H100s would be getting retired in favor of Blackwells. But they aren't. They are instead being locked in for years long contracts.

[lijok]

Millions of dollars? Where did you get that number from?

[gambiting]

...how much do you think each rocket launch costs?

[lijok]

Not millions of dollars per sat. Are you being intentionally obtuse?

[gambiting]

Are you intentionally misreading what I'm saying?