alt Hacker NewsIf you bought a big ass server for your home 10 years ago it probably wouldn't have even have had a GPU/AI accelerator at all. If it did, it would have been something with wimpy compute and VRAM because you needed the video encoder/decoder for security cameras or the like.
I'm not sure that really gives confidence hardware has really slowed down enough to invest in it for decades. Single core CPU performance has but that's not really what new things are using.
Replies
You’re kindof undermining your own point. Ten years later the only thing you’d need to upgrade for your home server might be the GPU - because a new use-case emerged. Okay? Spend $500-$1000 on an eGPU. Problem solved. Will that eGPU setup last another ten years? If all it’s doing is processing security video and routing claw-like tasks, then yes.
Decades is a long time for hardware, but "years" seems reasonable soon. The commercial models are "good enough" for a lot of things now, so if that performance makes its way into the on-device space for "home applicance"-level cost (<$5k at the start, basically), I'd expect a lot of stuff to start popping up there. In offices too.
Like the PC in the 80s starting to eat up "get a mainframe" or "rent time on a mainframe" uses.
Yeah but, how long do mainframes last? Think of the COBOL systems used in government. No reason to update them, they worked forever; their job is discrete and they performed it well enough where intense updating wasn't a requirement.
It really just depends on if the hardware is "good enough" for whatever its purpose is. If the hardware today can locally run whatever models for your security cameras, it's likely they will still be "good enough" in 10 years.
Of course, similar to a 10 year old car or appliance, you will be missing any new features or bells and whistles that have become available in the meantime.