[noosphr]

My local inference rig now costs three times what I bought it for. If I'd gotten the max ram I could at the time I would have made $10k after selling the excess to my current spec.

How someone can look at an asset class thats appreciated an order of magnitude in the last two years and say it will depreciate in value when the tailwinds are even stronger now is beyond me.

[snypher]

Yes, toilet paper and N95s were expensive and hard to buy once, which is why I stockpiled a lifetime supply of them. Suckers!

[dpark]

“Graph go up to the right. Graph stop at edge of paper. Must go up forever!”

[shdh]

Fundamentals dictate hardware is a depreciating asset, they're not wrong. They're just ignoring the reality of the current market.

[noosphr]

This was true when Moores law wasn't dead. Per watts performance has been flat since Ampere. There is a reason why undervolted 3090s are still used.

[codechicago277]

GPUs do have a life expectancy. They don’t run forever, especially at high temperatures and full utilization.

[noosphr]

You undervolt them because the last 50% of power adss 10% of compute.

[baq]

Undervolting is not running at max utilization by definition almost.

…but the real question whether you want to undervolt your asset if you’re renting it out is why bother? You probably expect to replace it anyway after it’s spec lifetime, for sure want to replace it when a more efficient solution is available since datacenters are power and volume constrained and customers care about performance much more than hardware longevity (otherwise they’d buy instead of rent).

[imtringued]

Why bother saving opex and capex?

Just waste more money! It's easy.

[fragmede]

Performance goes way up if you use liquid nitrogen to cool the chips. Maybe finally someone's willing to pay for that.

[DanielHB]

I have been hearing that memory suppliers are _intentionally_ not scaling up new factories like crazy because they assume the demand won't be there on the long term and they don't want to have spare unused capacity. Probably because Samsung and SK have a near duopoly on it as well...

At some point the market will be saturated with supply and prices will come down for older gen hardware. It can take years though, but it happened to fiber cable and fiber doesn't even depreciate like chips.

[mlyle]

Will it continue to appreciate to infinity? Maintain its value forever? Or will something else happen?

The same argument you’ve made would work for tulip bulbs, dotcom prices, or whatever. Prices go up until they don’t. Exponentials don’t last forever and the intrinsics of technology assets depreciate: things wear out and are also replaced with better things.

[iririririr]

everything* is 3x more expensive in the same amount of time though. that's inflation mostly.

* except ram