3 ms·
PCIe switches just shouldn't be so dammed expensive. A decade ago there was a lot more market competition but now there are, what, two companies with chips? It
by rektide 4y ago
PCIe switches just shouldn't be so dammed expensive. A decade ago there was a lot more market competition but now there are, what, two companies with chips?
It has gotten a good bit harder to build, especially with so many of the tricks & tight timings in PCIe 5 and 6, but the lack of market competition has made getting any kind of parts at all much much more expensive.
- bick_nyers 4y agoWith the cost of PLX PCIE Switches (allows you to e.g. PCIE 4.0 x16 -> PCIE 3.0 x32) it is actually worth considering just buying a second desktop and throwing in some high-bandwidth NIC and forming your own HPC. Or instead of using desktop parts just going EPYC/Xeon/Threadripper. Of course it all comes down to the fact that if you need those PCIE lanes, there's a very good chance that it's for your job, meaning that businesses are the target market, not the enthusiast building a homelab for tinkering with LLM off the clock.