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I really dislike the term hyperscaler. Comes off very insincere. They came up with it themselves, didn't they? What's the official definition supposed to be now

by therein 6mo ago

I really dislike the term hyperscaler. Comes off very insincere. They came up with it themselves, didn't they? What's the official definition supposed to be now? Companies that are setting up as many GPU/TPU server clusters as possible for a demand that's yet to exist?

cidd 6mo ago
Nobody really uses the term in the Valley except probably C-level people talking to Wall street investors.
bombcar 6mo ago
It always makes me think of a hyperactive toddler running around in circles, which oddly fits most thought leaders who use the term.
- lenerdenator 6mo ago
  That's not fair to the toddlers; their crap tends to be safely contained in a diaper as opposed to their heads.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
coffeefirst 6mo ago
I have concluded the entire public discourse surrounding AI has no relationship to real stuff that you can go, test, and point at. There’s a loop of everyone is saying stuff because everyone else is saying stuff that turns into a sort of reality inspired fan fiction. It’s not just that it’s wrong or imprecise, that I expect, it’s that the folklore takes on a life of its own.
mikrl 6mo ago
Superscaler sounds too much like superscalar…
rcxdude 6mo ago
Hyperscale exists as a term pre-LLM-hype. It mainly exists to describe the kind of datacenteres that companies like google and amazon have been building for at least a decade now: very large, very highly integrated and customised hardware, with a focus on cloud deployment and management strategies. This is to distinguish from just a large datacenter built with commodity server parts from a set of vendors (i.e. the kinds of servers 99% of people will be able to lay their hands on. Another way to put it is that if you're not writing your own BIOS/BMC/etc, you're probably not hyperscaling).
- tim333 6mo ago
  Some history: https://ocient.com/blog/the-history-of-hyperscale-in-computing-from-data-centers-to-software-workloads/ https://ocient.com/blog/the-history-of-hyperscale-in-computi... >The term “hyperscale” first emerged in the late 1990s, heralding a paradigm shift in the world of computing. It was primarily used to describe the awe-inspiring scale and capabilities of data centers...

by therein 6mo ago

cidd 6mo ago

Nobody really uses the term in the Valley except probably C-level people talking to Wall street investors.

bombcar 6mo ago

It always makes me think of a hyperactive toddler running around in circles, which oddly fits most thought leaders who use the term.

lenerdenator 6mo ago
That's not fair to the toddlers; their crap tends to be safely contained in a diaper as opposed to their heads.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

coffeefirst 6mo ago

I have concluded the entire public discourse surrounding AI has no relationship to real stuff that you can go, test, and point at. There’s a loop of everyone is saying stuff because everyone else is saying stuff that turns into a sort of reality inspired fan fiction. It’s not just that it’s wrong or imprecise, that I expect, it’s that the folklore takes on a life of its own.

mikrl 6mo ago

Superscaler sounds too much like superscalar…

rcxdude 6mo ago

Hyperscale exists as a term pre-LLM-hype. It mainly exists to describe the kind of datacenteres that companies like google and amazon have been building for at least a decade now: very large, very highly integrated and customised hardware, with a focus on cloud deployment and management strategies. This is to distinguish from just a large datacenter built with commodity server parts from a set of vendors (i.e. the kinds of servers 99% of people will be able to lay their hands on. Another way to put it is that if you're not writing your own BIOS/BMC/etc, you're probably not hyperscaling).

tim333 6mo ago
Some history: https://ocient.com/blog/the-history-of-hyperscale-in-computing-from-data-centers-to-software-workloads/ https://ocient.com/blog/the-history-of-hyperscale-in-computi... >The term “hyperscale” first emerged in the late 1990s, heralding a paradigm shift in the world of computing. It was primarily used to describe the awe-inspiring scale and capabilities of data centers...