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keedalast Wednesday at 7:05 AM1 replyview on HN

Right, the obsolence rate of GPUs is one of the primary drivers of the depreciation shenanigans aspect of the bubble.

However, I've come across a number of articles that paint a very different picture. E.g. this one is from someone in the GPU farm industry and is clearly going to be biased, but by the same token seems to be more knowledgeable. They claim that the demand is so high that even 9-year old generations still get booked like hot cakes: https://www.whitefiber.com/blog/understanding-gpu-lifecycle


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evaneliaslast Wednesday at 3:43 PM

> They claim that the demand is so high that even 9-year old generations still get booked like hot cakes

What does this prove? Demand is inflated in a bubble. If the AI company valuation bubble pops, demand for obsolete GPUs will evaporate.

The article you're linking here doesn't say what percentage of those 9-year-old GPUs already failed, nor does it say when they were first deployed, so it's hard to draw conclusions. In fact their math doesn't seem to consider failure at all, which is highly suspicious.

In another subthread, you pointed to the top comment here about a 5-year MTBF as supposedly contradicting the original article's thesis about depreciation. 5 years is obviously less than the 9 years here, so clearly something doesn't add up. (Besides, a 5-year MTBF is rather poor to begin with, and there isn't normally a correlation between depreciation and MTBF. So this is not a smoking gun which contradicts anything in Tim Bray's original article.)

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