I definitely don't think compute is anything like railroads and fibre, but I'm not so sure compute will continue it's efficiency gains of the past. Power consumption for these chips is climbing fast, lots of gains are from better hardware support for 8bit/4bit precision, I believe yields are getting harder to achieve as things get much smaller.
Betting against compute getting better/cheaper/faster is probably a bad idea, but fundamental improvements I think will be a lot slower over the next decade as shrinking gets a lot harder.
> I definitely don't think compute is anything like railroads and fibre, but I'm not so sure compute will continue it's efficiency gains of the past. Power consumption for these chips is climbing fast, lots of gains are from better hardware support for 8bit/4bit precision, I believe yields are getting harder to achieve as things get much smaller.
I'm no expert, buy my understanding is that as feature sizes shrink, semiconductors become more prone to failure over time. Those GPUs probably aren't going to all fry themselves in two years, but even if GPUs stagnate, chip longevity may limit the medium/long term value of the (massive) investment.
Could you show me?
Early turbines didn't last that long. Even modern ones are only rated for a few decades.
There is an absolute glut of cheap compute available right now due to VC and other funds dumping into the industry (take advantage of it while it exists!) but I'm pretty sure Wall St. will balk when they realize the continued costs of maintaining that compute and look at the revenue that expenditure is generating. People think of chips as a piece of infrastructure - you buy a personal computer and it'll keep chugging for a decade without issue in most case - but GPUs are essentially consumables - they're an input to producing the compute a data center sells that needs constant restocking - rather than a one-time investment.
- Most big tech companies are investing in data centers using operating cash flow, not levering it
- The hyperscalers have in recent years been tweaking the depreciation schedules of regular cloud compute assets (extending them), so there's a push and a pull going on for CPU vs GPU depreciation
- I don't think anyone who knows how to do fundamental analysis expects any asset to "keep chugging for a decade without issue" unless it's explicitly rated to do so (like e.g. a solar panel). All assets have depreciation schedules, GPUs are just shorter than average, and I don't think this is a big mystery to big money on Wall St
If we're talking about the whole compute system like a gb200, is there a particular component that breaks first? How hard are they to refurbish, if that particular component breaks? I'm guessing they didn't have repairability in mind, but I also know these "chips" are much more than chips now so there's probably some modularity if it's not the chip itself failing.
* memory IC failure
* power delivery component failure
* dead core
* cracked BGA solder joints on core
* damaged PCB due to sag
These issues are compounded by
* huge power consumption and heat output of core and memory, compared to system CPU/memory
* physical size of core leads to more potential for solder joint fracture due to thermal expansion/contraction
* everything needs to fit in PCIe card form factor
* memory and core not socketed, if one fails (or supporting circuitry on the PCB fails) then either expensive repair or the card becomes scrap
* some vendors have cards with design flaws which lead to early failure
* sometimes poor application of thermal paste/pads at factory (eg, only half of core making contact
* and, in my experience in aquiring 4-5 year old GPUs to build gaming PCs with (to sell), almost without fail the thermal paste has dried up and the card is thermal throttling
Since they were run 24/7, there was rarely the kind of heat stress that kills cards (heating and cooling cycles).
Number of cycles that goes through silicon matters, but what matters most really are temperature and electrical shocks.
If the GPUs are stable, at low temperature they can be at full load for years. There are servers out there up from decades and decades.
