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I love how crypto has become easy-to-blame, when in fact datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed to the brim with chips for ML workloads. It's important t

I love how crypto has become easy-to-blame, when in fact datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed to the brim with chips for ML workloads. It's important to recognize when consumers are being squeezed by multiple market forces.

zpeti 5y ago
Not just ML, with everything moving to cloud services, while consumers still use phones plus laptops, the number of chips used per person more and more.
- HanaShiratori 5y ago
  I'm not an advocate for cloud services by all means, but aren't they generally much more efficient in using their resources than traditional on premise solutions due to the sharing of the underlying infrastructure?
Leader2light 5y ago
It's being blamed because cryptocurrency is pointless trash. How can governments print money with a entire new currency in existence outside their control. They can't, the system would collapse upon which we all depend. Thankfully cryptocurrency simply does not function as a currency and is a tool to get rich in normal currency.
qeternity 5y ago
Datacenters are not deploying consumer GPUs.
- skohan 5y ago
  It's still mediated by the same bottlenecks right? NVidia would be able to produce more consumer GPU's if they weren't competing for capacity at TSMC and Samsung
- positr0n 5y ago
  But datacenter CPU/GPUs take the same wafers, machines, and factory time slots as consumer GPUs. Which that is the price increase this article is about.
  - qeternity 5y ago
    Ok - I wasn’t replying to the article - I was replying to a comment about crypto-induced price increases of consumer gear being blamed on datacenters, which just isn’t true. It’s not that OEM prices are going up, it’s that retail prices are. Nvidia might sell a consumer GPU which is immediately resold on the retail market at 100% markup. This is driven by crypto, not DL.
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      > Nvidia might sell a consumer GPU which is immediately resold on the retail market at 100% markup. The same might be said of event ticket resellers making a big markup. But the reality is that, in the case of event tickets at least, it's very common for the original sellers and the resellers either to be secretly the same party, or at least have some kind of profit sharing agreement. It's simply that the original seller doesn't want to be seen to be price gouging, so doesn't want to put the list price of an item up, but still wants to gain. That's frequently done by it being very expensive to become an 'approved seller' or similar.
      - qeternity 5y ago
        Agreed. I actually don't have a problem with ticket resellers for the very reason that if there is an active resale market the tickets were too cheap to begin with (or more likely, as you note, were never really available at those prices anyway as the promoters are selling at 2x face through the back door). If someone is willing to pay 2x MSRP for a GPU then the MSRP is wrong (or rather, it's just a "suggestion" as the S indicates). My only point is that up until recently, there was not a long-term secondary market for GPUs. That is a new phenomenon that has been driven by crypto (as opposed to a big reduction in supply or huge increase in PC gamers).
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
The issue is that crypto mining is the only system designed to have negative marginal utility for each GPU consumed. It literally pays people to take energy and GPUs away from the open market for zero incremental gain to the network. The difference is that each additional iPhone or ML accelerator or cloud server CPU provides incrementally more utility. More ML accelerators means more ML processing. Proof-of-work mining is the only system designed to get less efficient with each additional unit of compute power. Add another GPU to the mining network and the network will automatically become less efficient. More GPUs doesn’t mean more transactions, but the system pays people to essentially burn these GPUs. That’s the complaint. Not that chips are being used, but that the marginal output of each additional GPU is negative.
- officialchicken 5y ago
  I have capital I want to deploy. Zero/Negative interest rates are a reality. Traditional broker managed investments are a hot zone for fees. Newer tools for access to markets is covered by reddit day traders; real estate is also highly competitive due to airbnb businesses and other forces. Capital will always find the easiest path, and right now that's crypto and no one on HN is complaining about micro-VC activity.
- dkersten 5y ago
  > more ML processing I would argue that most ML processing by most "big data" companies also has marginal negative output for each additional GPU. Certainly anything to do with social media or adtech and a lot of analytics in general is a net negative for the world, while consuming electricity and processing hardware.
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    If you are this reductionist you can argue all electricity consumption is net negative.
    - yholio 5y ago
      They are not being reductionist. Each additional hashing unit cancels out at the next difficulty adjustment, having a net effect of zero on the overall working of the network. Yes, the hash rate of the network increases, thus the difficulty for an attacker to perform a double spend. But, arguably, that's an already insane level of resources, many orders of magnitude higher than what a bitcoin-like payment system would reasonably require. So even if you consider the network socially useful, pouring thousands of times more hashing power that the network actually requires to perform its task securely is still a waste of resources.
baybal2 5y ago
> when in fact datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed to the brim with chips for ML workloads. I don't see this at all. All these GPUs for non gaming use are a tiny drop in the ocean in comparison to the mainstream market.
Taek 5y ago
It's mostly not ML either. There were production hiccups do to covid, increased consumer demand for chips due to covid, increased demand of mobile chips because the mobile industry is still massively growing, among other issues. Crypto and ML are each rather small aspects of the issue at hand.

zpeti 5y ago

Not just ML, with everything moving to cloud services, while consumers still use phones plus laptops, the number of chips used per person more and more.

HanaShiratori 5y ago
I'm not an advocate for cloud services by all means, but aren't they generally much more efficient in using their resources than traditional on premise solutions due to the sharing of the underlying infrastructure?

Leader2light 5y ago

It's being blamed because cryptocurrency is pointless trash. How can governments print money with a entire new currency in existence outside their control. They can't, the system would collapse upon which we all depend. Thankfully cryptocurrency simply does not function as a currency and is a tool to get rich in normal currency.

qeternity 5y ago

Datacenters are not deploying consumer GPUs.

skohan 5y ago
It's still mediated by the same bottlenecks right? NVidia would be able to produce more consumer GPU's if they weren't competing for capacity at TSMC and Samsung
positr0n 5y ago
But datacenter CPU/GPUs take the same wafers, machines, and factory time slots as consumer GPUs. Which that is the price increase this article is about.
- qeternity 5y ago
  Ok - I wasn’t replying to the article - I was replying to a comment about crypto-induced price increases of consumer gear being blamed on datacenters, which just isn’t true. It’s not that OEM prices are going up, it’s that retail prices are. Nvidia might sell a consumer GPU which is immediately resold on the retail market at 100% markup. This is driven by crypto, not DL.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    > Nvidia might sell a consumer GPU which is immediately resold on the retail market at 100% markup. The same might be said of event ticket resellers making a big markup. But the reality is that, in the case of event tickets at least, it's very common for the original sellers and the resellers either to be secretly the same party, or at least have some kind of profit sharing agreement. It's simply that the original seller doesn't want to be seen to be price gouging, so doesn't want to put the list price of an item up, but still wants to gain. That's frequently done by it being very expensive to become an 'approved seller' or similar.
    - qeternity 5y ago
      Agreed. I actually don't have a problem with ticket resellers for the very reason that if there is an active resale market the tickets were too cheap to begin with (or more likely, as you note, were never really available at those prices anyway as the promoters are selling at 2x face through the back door). If someone is willing to pay 2x MSRP for a GPU then the MSRP is wrong (or rather, it's just a "suggestion" as the S indicates). My only point is that up until recently, there was not a long-term secondary market for GPUs. That is a new phenomenon that has been driven by crypto (as opposed to a big reduction in supply or huge increase in PC gamers).

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

The issue is that crypto mining is the only system designed to have negative marginal utility for each GPU consumed. It literally pays people to take energy and GPUs away from the open market for zero incremental gain to the network. The difference is that each additional iPhone or ML accelerator or cloud server CPU provides incrementally more utility. More ML accelerators means more ML processing. Proof-of-work mining is the only system designed to get less efficient with each additional unit of compute power. Add another GPU to the mining network and the network will automatically become less efficient. More GPUs doesn’t mean more transactions, but the system pays people to essentially burn these GPUs. That’s the complaint. Not that chips are being used, but that the marginal output of each additional GPU is negative.

officialchicken 5y ago
I have capital I want to deploy. Zero/Negative interest rates are a reality. Traditional broker managed investments are a hot zone for fees. Newer tools for access to markets is covered by reddit day traders; real estate is also highly competitive due to airbnb businesses and other forces. Capital will always find the easiest path, and right now that's crypto and no one on HN is complaining about micro-VC activity.
dkersten 5y ago
> more ML processing I would argue that most ML processing by most "big data" companies also has marginal negative output for each additional GPU. Certainly anything to do with social media or adtech and a lot of analytics in general is a net negative for the world, while consuming electricity and processing hardware.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  If you are this reductionist you can argue all electricity consumption is net negative.
  - yholio 5y ago
    They are not being reductionist. Each additional hashing unit cancels out at the next difficulty adjustment, having a net effect of zero on the overall working of the network. Yes, the hash rate of the network increases, thus the difficulty for an attacker to perform a double spend. But, arguably, that's an already insane level of resources, many orders of magnitude higher than what a bitcoin-like payment system would reasonably require. So even if you consider the network socially useful, pouring thousands of times more hashing power that the network actually requires to perform its task securely is still a waste of resources.

baybal2 5y ago

> when in fact datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed to the brim with chips for ML workloads. I don't see this at all. All these GPUs for non gaming use are a tiny drop in the ocean in comparison to the mainstream market.

Taek 5y ago

It's mostly not ML either. There were production hiccups do to covid, increased consumer demand for chips due to covid, increased demand of mobile chips because the mobile industry is still massively growing, among other issues. Crypto and ML are each rather small aspects of the issue at hand.