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Comment by francoisdevlin | Hacker News Reader

It's a cool toy, and obviously I'll be the manliest developer on my team if I had this... But what does it actually do? If I need that much compute for a problem, doesn't renting the capacity on AWS make 100x more sense? There's no way I could actually make use of all that hardware

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It's a workstation. The following people might make use of all that hardware:

* Game development engineer who needs to test games at all graphics settings;

* Digital artist who needs to rapidly iterate by creating draft renderings quickly before sending the model/scene to a render farm;

* Roboticist developing robotics algorithms that require lots of local data collected in the field that would be infeasible to upload to AWS;

* Physicist developing computational models which should be tested on smaller instance locally before sending off to a supercomputer.

Besides, if you're planning to use a machine for compute for more than several months, it becomes cost-efficient vs renting an AWS instance.

"But what does it actually do?"

It manipulates 1's and 0's at a rapid rate and high precision.

"If I need that much compute for a problem, doesn't renting the capacity on AWS make 100x more sense? There's no way I could actually make use of all that hardware"

It's probably not for you then, just like the AWS instance wouldn't make a lot of sense for some guy playing Crysis.

For a web server that has low latency throughout the world, and if you don't know any cheaper provider that has equivalent reliability, yes. aws makes sense. Introducing network dependency and latency to your work environment, not sure how that makes any sense.

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