[zozbot234]

These datacenters are already running old, inefficient, slow GPUs from five years ago in addition to newly released cards, because anything newer than that is extremely bottlenecked and they need all the compute they can get. Why should it be any different in five years' time? Even nVidia is rumored to be about to bring back the RTX 3060 which is an Ampere architecture card that got released around 2021. It's just fine.

[DrewADesign]

If those data centers were good enough, they’d save themselves a few billion dollars and just do more of the same, wouldn’t they? Many current video games struggle on the 3060— it’s like 10 times slower for interference than a 4090 even. They’re reintroducing it because their upstream business of selling brand new insanely expensive GPUs required for every new data center is making it impossible for people to buy GPUs for their home computers. It says nothing about data-center-class GPUs except that every company currently has a burning desire to only have the latest and greatest GPUs.

[zozbot234]

The new GPUs are a lot better than the old ones, to be sure. They're also a whole lot harder to get ahold of in quantity. That's no different than the reason for officially reintroducing the 3060.

[DrewADesign]

That doesn’t make this more sustainable or viable in the long term, which is the entire point

[voncheese]

Yeah, conceptually this isn't all that different from new VM SKUs coming out in clouds. The costs and rate of change for AI hardware may be higher, and perhaps enough higher to mess up the math, but conceptually its a model that has been proven to work.

[petra]

Unless some disrutive technology comes along in 5 years time. And many are working on exactly that.