3 ms·
>The other part of this is that expensive silicon is not going to sit idle. It needs baseload power Why not? Just have the excess of computational capacity in
by drysine 2y ago
>The other part of this is that expensive silicon is not going to sit idle. It needs baseload power
Why not? Just have the excess of computational capacity in many different regions and compute where the sun is shining bright now.
- scarab92 2y agoBecause amortised capital cost > operational (power) cost It's cheaper to build a 1 GW baseload power plant to sit beside your existing GPUs, than to buy another 1 GW of GPUs to place on the other side of the planet. Also, latency. Also, a large scale roll out of nuclear would be cheaper than solar regardless. Most of the cost of recent nuclear builds is learning cost. We build them so infrequently that people retire or move on before the next one is built, so we have to learn how to build them from scratch, and develop the supply chains from scratch each time.
- drysine 2y agoBut is it cheaper? Building 1GW nuclear power unit costs about 4 billion dollars [0] [0] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Белорусская_АЭС#Стоимость_проекта https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Белорусская_АЭС#Стоимость_прое...
- drysine 2y agoOk, it's indeed much cheaper. Unless, of course, it's the Vogtle plant or similar Western-built one, which cost about 17 billions per GW and took 10 years to construct. In this case, the price is comparable if you factor in the cost of money.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y agoThis is actually a very good and creative idea, but doesn't account for the cost of the computational capacity (specifically the chips). In the future, if chips become commoditized, your solution could work, but not in the current chip environment.