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Comment by kkielhofner | Hacker News Reader

Pascal series are cheap because they are CUDA compute capability 6.0 and lack Tensor Cores. Volta (7.0) was the first to have Tensor Cores and in many cases is the bare minimum for modern/current stacks.

See flash attention, triton, etc as core enabling libraries. Not to mention all of the custom CUDA kernels all over the place. Take all of this and then stack layers on top of them...

Unfortunately there is famously "GPU poor vs GPU rich". Pascal puts you at "GPU destitute" (regardless of assembled VRAM) and outside of implementations like llama.cpp that go incredible and impressive lengths to support these old archs you will very quickly run into show-stopping issues that make you wish you just handed over the money for >= 7.0.

I support any use of old hardware but this kind of reminds me of my "ancient" X5690 that has impressive performance (relatively speaking) but always bites me because it doesn't have AVX.

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This is all very true for Machine-Learning research tasks, were yes, if you want that latest PyTorch library function to work you need to be on the latest ML code.

But my work/fun is in CFD. One of the main codes I use for work was written to be supported primarily at the time of Pascal. Other HPC stuff too that can be run via OpenCL, and is still plenty compatible. Things compiled back then will still run today; It's not a moving target like ML has been.

Exactly. Demand for FP64 is significantly lower than for ML/AI.

Pascal isn’t incredibly cheap by comparison because it’s some secret hack. It’s cheap by comparison because most of the market (AI/ML) doesn’t want it. Speaking of which…

At the risk of “No True Scotsman” what qualifies as HPC gets interesting but just today I was at a Top500 site that was talking about their Volta system not being worth the power, which is relevant to parent comment but still problematic for reasons.

I mentioned llama.cpp because the /r/locallama crowd, etc has actually driven up the cost of used Pascal hardware because they treat it as a path to get VRAM on the cheap with their very very narrow use cases.

If we’re talking about getting a little FP64 for CFD that’s one thing. ML/AI is another. HPC is yet another.

Hey that’s not fair, the X5690 is VERY efficient… at heating a home in the winter time.

Easier said than done. I've got a dual X5690 at home in Kiev, Ukraine and I just couldn't find anything to run on it 24x7. And it doesn't produce much heat idling. I mean at all.

All the sane and rational people are rooting for you here in the U.S. I’m sorry our government is garbage and aid hasn’t been coming through as expected. Hopefully Ukraine can stick it to that chicken-fucker in the Kremlin and retake Crimea too.

I didn’t have an X5690 because the TDP was too high for my server’s heatsinks, but I had 90W variants of the same generation. To me, two at idle produced noticeable heat, though not as much as four idling in a PowerEdge R910 did. The R910 idled at around 300W.

There’s always Folding@Home if you don’t mind the electric bill. Plex is another option. I know a guy running a massive Plex server that was on Westmere/Nehalem Xeons until I gave him my R720 with Haswell Xeons.

> I’m sorry our government is garbage

It looks pathetic indeed. Makes many people question: if THAT'S democracy, then maybe it's not worth fighting for.

> All the sane and rational people are rooting for you here in the U.S.

The same could be said about russian people (sane and rational ones). But what do both people have in common? The answer is: currently both nations are helpless to change what their government does.

> are rooting for you here in the U.S.

I know. We all truly know and greatly appreciate that. There would be no Ukraine if not American weapons and help.

> There’s always Folding@Home

Makes little sense power-wise.

Run BOINC maybe? [0]

[0]: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

Makes little sense to actually run anything on X5960 power-wise

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