alt Hacker NewsA few months ago, there was a lot of news lambasting tech companies for extending the depreciation lifespan of GPUs from ~3 years to ~5 years. Do these price hikes suggest a longer lifespan is probably the right way to see how long these GPUs will be valuable?
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It mainly depends on how much NVIDIA is overselling the improvements.
With adding RL functions, separating prefill and decode chips, nvfp4 and lots of other architectural changes efficiency of the most valuable tasks goes up as long as the algorithms don't change significantly.
Everything else can just stay on older chips.
The people who think that high end GPUs don't last for ~5 years (really it's 6) do not know what they are talking about. 6 years is likely too low. If the cooling is good and they don't fail early, most of these GPUs could still keep going past 6 years.
I'm convinced that anything with more than 80gb of VRAM will be worth it for closer to 10 years at this point.
Not a finance guy, so fully prepared to be wrong here. But my interpretation is that an increase in price corresponds to a shorter lifespan. i.e. less time to make money so we need to charge more to get the same return over less time
It could also be a supply/demand issue, generally price increases are caused by either 1. demand increasing, or 2. supply decreasing.
In this case we can interpret a shorter lifespan as decreased supply, but it can also be because the demand for GPU compute has gone up. I think in this case we're seeing a bit of both, but it's hard to tell without more data.
We could also consider the supply / demand elasticity changing, f.x since demand has become more price inelastic it could result in a higher price.