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Comment by joaomacp | Hacker News Reader

Of course. Gamers are the biggest consumers of new, top of the line PC hardware.

I doubt gamers are outspending datacenters and owners of private clusters.

Aside from concatenating & storing strings, the prime uses of these big clusters are machine learning and data analytics, both of which have very similar instruction patterns to games. Like another commenter on this article pointed out, if you make single-precision linear algebra fast, you'll cover the vast majority of cases where people actually need a faster CPU.

That's fine, but it is not the same thing as saying gamers drive the hardware. Gamers are benefiting because their games need the same things the big clusters do.

Server hardware is mostly a separate market from PC hardware, since there are different things to optimize for.

Not really, as a sibling pointed out. The core microarchitecture is the same. The difference is in ancillary on-chip features like memory and bus controllers.

Yet Intel sells essentially the same microarchitecture to both

...at enormously different price/flop, basically because it restricts RAM size and disables ECC in the Core chips. It's why we need AMD's Zen to be competitive again, so that this price gouging ends. Same for Tesla/Geforce at Nvidia.

They do if you take into account total numbers. It's a market of many many billions USD value with millions of users. Sure, each datacenter individually spends a lot but we're talking a difference in the amount of individual users probably in the 5 orders of magnitude range here.

Number of customers is irrelevant. Number of chips is what matters.

In numbers? Sure they do.

What do you mean, "in numbers"? As I pointed out elsewhere, the number of distinct customers is irrelevant; the number of chips sold is relevant, and I do not believe gamers buy more chips than compute farms.

What about lifetime ? datacenter aren't renewed every year. Many gamers upgrade on a yearly basis. Lot less money but maybe newer consumer hardware.

There has been no need to upgrade yearly for games since about the Wolfdale era, so those types of people are getting more and more rare, and are motivated mostly by spec sheets rather than real-world performance.

Many data centers go through a process of constant expansion and renewal, as they are competing with others and there is a larger financial incentive for them to do so.

VR has been causing a small resurgence in upgrades this year, since you need a fairly high-end graphics card for it. I.e. you need to have spent the price of a cheap computer on your GPU if you bought it last-gen, or somewhere above $250 if you're buying right now.

Similarly, 4k displays require a lot of GPU power, though I think it's viewed as even more frivolous / excessive than building for VR.

The number of gamers who upgrade yearly is fairly small, and the number who upgrade their base platform (CPU + mobo) yearly is even smaller. I would be very surprised if there were more than a million in the latter category.

As for datacenters and compute farms, the large ones are upgrading portions of their systems yearly, if not expanding on top of that.

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