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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

The NVIDIA A100 is like 400W and being dumped by the truckload into datacenters as fast as the fabs can deliver them. I don't think a little "waste" in premium desktop CPUs that are going to struggle to sell more than a half million units is worth crying over.

For sure this is more fun to watch than another liquid cooling overclocking rig.

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Yeah also this CPU user won't utilize it at 100% on 24/7 so it's same efficiency as non-K for most of time.

The average GPU utilization in AI clusters is nowhere near 100%. More like 15-20% outside of hyperscalers being generous and maybe mid 30% for the hyperscalers for periods of heavy activity.

There is way too much gated on data movement at this point. Sure, CXL or other interconnect schemes may help but there are whole-system challenges for scheduling and dependency management and staging that drive these numbers.

DC's are paying $11k apiece for the A100 do ya think?

No one pays retail

cries in climate change

My CPU is powered by nuclear energy

And a lot of datacenter CPUs are also on renewables that are helped by the kind of work done with these halo / flagship consumer products. After all, the power efficiency in datacenters is probably more important in aggregate given they're likely going to go into legacy power grids over time as hyper scalers switch generations (oftentimes due to greater power efficiency).

Some of the engine work done for drag racing cars did make its way into consumer cars and it's not like grandma and grandpa are going to be ever running these high end CPUs either.

Power efficiency gains in recent generations have been pretty incredible - somewhere around 95% aggregate performance with half the aggregate power consumption of these processors is really crazy.

It’s a bit of propaganda that the DCs are powered by renewables.

https://gerrymcgovern.com/data-centers-greenwashing-par-exce...

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