Comment on MSI's $80 AMD motherboards with DDR4 support swoop in to rescue gamers amid the global RAM crisis
carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works 14 hours agoI doubt it. Those AI computers are built in a really weird way and have a lot of hardware that isn’t really useful outside an AI/HPC context. Some stuff like the weird card to card network topology can be reconfigured but the rest of it can’t easily be. The servers are rather agressively designed around keeping as many GPUs fed as possible making them kinda weird for other jobs. Those datacenter cards are missing enough video hardware (for example texture units) to make gaming hard and I’m not sure there’s that much consumer demand for linear algebra accelerators. If they can’t find more HPC jobs they may go under. Movie studios could have interesting opportunities here but they are still primarily using CPUs in all their software IIRC.
fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
GPGPU usage is probally going to see some real usage. There was an interesting talk at the xorg conf even about turn the video hardware into virtual services running on GPGPU focused hardware.
Ive talked with some of the HPC programers too who are trying to find creative repurposes already lol
tal@lemmy.today 4 hours ago
I think that it’s fair to say that AI is not the only application for that hardware, but I also think that carpelbridgesyndrome’s point was that they aren’t really well-suited to replace conventional servers, which is the sort of thing that ouRKaoS was worried about. I’d also add that the physical buildings have way more cooling capacity than is necessary for that too, so they probably wouldn’t be the most-cost-effective approach even if you replaced the computing hardware in the buildings.