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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

Original title is "Competitive performance claims and industry leading Inference performance on AMD Instinct MI300X"

Looking good for AMD, not that it matters to me since they're both way outta my league.

This is how I feel watching those shows listing all of the stats on super cars. Yes, they're fast and they're pretty, but I'll never afford one, so learning the inner details is lost effort on me

I'm hoping to buy a used 'super car'

Is that allowed? I assumed that they wouldn't allow you to sell it. I guess they want to have their own Certified pre-owned side of the show room?

The horrible concept the a “sale” is only a revocable license hasn’t spread to cars too much yet. There is a robust trade in high end used cars via private parties and specialists - you can just look at eBay motors for plenty of examples.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/296067000770?hash=item44eef7e9c2%3A...

Bear in mind that some of the super car brands do mandate terms like a "right of first refusal" in their favour, giving them the ability to block sales.

* https://wheelsonspin.com/rules-for-buying-a-ferrari/

* https://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/threads/right-of-first-ref...

I think the only car company that I’ve heard of doing something like that is Ferrari, who will ban you for various lengths of time (including for life) from buying another Ferrari.

In August, I bought a used server for $1k. It was manufactured in 2017 and it probably cost at least $50k when it was new. Things are expensive when they are new, but everything new will eventually become old.

Cool! What are the specs?

I purchased two Dell Poweredge C4130 servers with 2x Intel Xeon E5-2697 v4 (18 cores @ 2.3GHz), 128 GiB of RAM @ 2400 MHz, and 2x 2000W PSUs. One with 4x AMD MI25 and one with 2x AMD FirePro S9300 X2. I rounded the cost. It was 2.5k USD for the pair, including shipping.

The machines were labelled YETI1 and YETI2. I will have to take good care of them because I think they may have some historic significance. In any case, these machines have a second life as workers for the Debian AI Team CI.

More info: https://lists.debian.org/debian-ai/2023/10/msg00009.html

It looks ok for AMD. Trust me a 30% speed advantage is not enough to move the market at all. It's way way easier to tweak your CUDA model to get a 30% speed up than to rewrite it.

Maybe if they consistently hold this lead for a decade...

Right, I didn't mean to imply it's earth shattering by any means, but at least they're not hopelessly behind on the hardware side. Software can't magically conjure performance from anemic hardware.

That said, software hasn't been AMDs strong side in this arena, so a lot of catching up there as well.

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