Dell exec reveals Nvidia has a 1,000-watt GPU in the works

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/05/nvidias_b100_gpu_1000w/

by mfiguiere • 2 years ago

39 57 2 years ago

bayindirh7• 2 years ago

The big question is "Will it blend (with the datacenter dynamics, power distribution and cooling)?".

Considering a conservative 4GPU system adds a 1.2KW additional overhead, packing these together densely in racks is a huge ordeal.

agilob3• 2 years ago

The big questions is, my heat pump is 2.6 kW, can I remove the heat pump and run 2 of these GPUs instead?

TeMPOraL3• 2 years ago

If you find a way to extract compute from the work done by a compressor, sure. But then you'll be able to afford the heatpump and any number of GPUs, for the money you get from overturning laws of thermodynamics.

c_o_n_v_e_x• 2 years ago

Considering that heat pumps have a coefficient of performance of greater than 1 (meaning they are moving more than 2.6 kw of heat), no. You'd probably need 3 to 5 GPUs to get comparable levels of warmth.

michaelt• 2 years ago

These days you can already get water-cooled servers [1] and rack-mount water distribution manifolds [2]

[1] https://www.supermicro.com/en/solutions/liquid-cooling [2] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/power8?topic=POWER8/p8had/p8had_...

bayindirh7• 2 years ago

I mean, we have these, but changing to a bigger CDU just because you decided to get a rack of GPU servers is not always fun/easy/doable.

Even if you just upgrade them, then there's the primary loop's capacity.

agilob3• 2 years ago

I can't find it anymore, but I remember reading a few years ago about a watercooled server farm that used an outdoor water fountain. It wasn't a single rack, but a few 100s of them

Timber-6539• 2 years ago

Looks like a solution in search of a problem.

bayindirh7• 2 years ago

AI workloads are currently going through their "developers are expensive, hardware is cheap(ish)" era. Nobody is trying very hard to fit models to GPUs, and optimize utilization and whatnot.

Instead they throw in more GPUs. So B100 will fit right into the bill.

dpacmittal• 2 years ago

There's a lot of work being put in to make LLMs run on consumer hardware, albeit it's being done by the open source community and not the companies themselves.

hardware2win• 2 years ago

"developers are expensive, hardware is cheap(ish)"

Is it even true?

H100 is worth 1 year of salary of mid engineer in eastern eu - 40k usd before tax

3abiton• 2 years ago

The problem is EU's winter. Pair this bad boy with a heat pump and watch it roar.

yau8edq12i• 2 years ago

Nice, we'll be able to consume the Earth's resources even faster. Congrats everyone!

eru3• 2 years ago

Huh? This is an AI accelerator card. So you should be looking at performance per Watt, instead of absolute numbers. The linked article doesn't mention anything about that.

amelius2• 2 years ago

Yeah so they should increase the efficiency instead of the power.

Voultapher3• 2 years ago

As long as we insist on doing the same thing, we will never use less in total. Point me to any sizable consumption field where gains in efficiency didn't translate to more usage.

refurb2• 2 years ago

The best way to enjoy HN is to just ignore these comments. There are a lot of bored, angsty, frustrated, lonely people, many struggling with mental illness that like to make comments like this for no other reason than getting attention.

ovi256• 2 years ago

We've never consumed resources faster, yet there's never been more resources made accessible by our efforts for us all to consume. Every tech advance unlocks more!

Space exploration and mining will be a step change in accessible resources. Why not enjoy the non-scarcity!

swader999• 2 years ago

We'll blow ourselves up before climate and scarcity are solved. AI might help with this.

ta1243• 2 years ago

Depends what the externalities of that resource usage are, and who bares them.

Currently while NVidea shareholders reap the reward, it's people in the global south that suffer the immediate consequences (although the rest of us will eventually too)

badrabbit2• 2 years ago

I must disagree. Do you oppose renewable energy? If not then by definition, it is possible to use more energy and not deplete any natural resources. The consumer blaming technique is one fossil fuel companies like to spread and I believe you are inadvertently spreading.

I was just reading an HN post about AWS getting rights to a nuclear powerplant. FAANG companies are getting more and more carbon neutral datacenters. The increasing energy needs of humans can be met with renewable energy. But saying it's people's fault for not conserving energy is giving power companies an excuse to continue using fossil fuels.

phh• 2 years ago

Renewable energy does deplete a lot of natural resources. Even assuming it is carbon neutral (it isn't). Even assuming we're still capable of constructing those without fossil energy (we currently can't). Even assuming mining of various minerals is done without fossil energy (it isn't). Even assuming it doesn't require any mining (it does). It still largely requires "natural surfaces" where we have to disrupt local environments. It might be net benefits (offshore wind farms seem to improve diversity), but we have no renewable energy growth that doesn't require first for the natural resources to take a toll.

Don't get me wrong, I do think this is where we're heading towards, and I feel it's okay. But let's not be blind that yes even assuming we go towards fully renewable energy (still a big if, or rather very long when), any growth of energy consumption comes with a cost to natural resources.

pjmlp2• 2 years ago

We will nuke ourselves before resources are fully wasted.

ethanbond• 2 years ago

There’s zero evidence for that.

NoGravitas2• 2 years ago

Maybe. The increased competition and other side effects of increased resource usage also increase the chance of us nuking ourselves, so it's liable to be a close-run thing.

TeMPOraL3• 2 years ago

Consuming resources is a necessary part of living. Question is, what do we get out of consumed resources. And at this point, it's logical and clear, the only way to go from here is out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab_mH8R0KTM

whywhywhywhy• 2 years ago

Can't take a statement like this seriously when received in digital form, send it me as a letter.

namlem• 2 years ago

The resources are there for us to consume

hresvelgr2• 2 years ago

With the recent breakthrough in ternary weight models it'll be interesting to see how needed this kind of bruteforce power will be.

throwaway4good• 2 years ago

You would still use floating point for training afaik.

Aardwolf2• 2 years ago

Why not have both software and hardware improvements? This is like saying we shouldn't have any new CPUs after the the PDP-1 because quicksort got invented

TeMPOraL3• 2 years ago

Yeah, there's this weird notion that OSS work on running LLMs on consumer hardware, and researching more efficient architectures, is somehow in opposition or competition to the Evil AI Wielding Corporations. It's not. Like always, whatever tool an individual has, a corporation can afford to use more of it, and use it better.

hresvelgr2• 2 years ago

This is like saying we shouldn't have any new CPUs after the the PDP-1 because quicksort got invented

I didn't assert anything here, I merely pondered. However, lets pretend that I did say that we shouldn't need heavy GPUs anymore. I don't think that's an entirely bad take because it would be fantastic if we could run larger models with more parameters on lower spec hardware. Especially phones that aren't flagship models.

bigpaw• 2 years ago

Those dedicated gpus draw way too much power. Why isnt there more focus on low power cards?

Same on cpus.

Electricity prices are set to drastically increase in my area.

Dell exec reveals Nvidia has a 1,000-watt GPU in the works

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