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Comment by nwiswell | Hacker News Reader

> I don't see a "buy now" button or a PCIe version anywhere here

"Buy now" buttons and online shopping carts are not generally how organizations looking to spend serious money on AI buy their hardware.

They have a long list of server hardware partners, and odds are you'd already have an existing relationship with one or more of them, and they'd provide a quote.

They even go one step further and show off some of their partners' solutions:

https://www.amd.com/en/graphics/servers-instinct-deep-learni...

FWIW I believe Supermicro and Exxact actually do have web-based shopping carts these days, so maybe you could skip the quotation and buy directly if you were so motivated? Seems kind of weird at this price point.

https://www.exxactcorp.com/Exxact-TS4-185328443-E185328443

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... and that's why AMD is losing.

They could break the trend and offer a "buy now" button instead of offering quotes and coffee chats. It's very likely that will kickstart the software snowball with early adopters.

Nobody is going to drop millions on an unproven platform.

> Seems kind of weird at this price point.

Yeah that $234K server is too much for people to do a trial. It has 8xMI300X GPUs along with a bunch of other shit.

Give me a single MI300X GPU in PCIe form factor for $20K and I'd very seriously consider. I'm sure there are many people who would help adapt the ecosystem if they were truly available.

Why would you be looking to dip your toe into the AMD ecosystem for the first time using an MI300X? It doesn't make any sense. It's not entry level hardware.

To help fix the ecosystem. It's way more affordable than Nvidia.

I'm not looking for entry level hardware.

Yes, that's why you'd choose AMD, I'm saying that you don't enter the ecosystem for the first time by purchasing the absolute cutting edge hardware.

As far as I'm aware you can't simply buy an Nvidia B200 PCIe card over the counter, either.

I'm not looking to enter the ecosystem, I'm already deep in it and want to fix the AMD problem so that I can build big projects around it and undercut everyone who's using Nvidia.

You can purchase H100 and A100 PCIe cards over the counter. They're great for compiling CUDA code, testing code before you launch a multi-node job into a cluster, and for running evaluations.

AMD has nothing of the sort, and it's hurting them.

I cannot blow 250K on an SMCI server, nor do I have the electricity setup for it. I can blow 20K on a PCIe GPU and start contributing to the ecosystem, or maybe prove out an idea on one GPU before trying to raise millions from a VC to build a more cost-effective datacenter that actually works.

> AMD has nothing of the sort, and it's hurting them.

What are you talking about? Have you looked?

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/amd-mi210-300w-pcie-64gb-pas...

https://www.bitworks.io/product/amd-instinct-mi210-64gb-hbm2...

A 20k GPU will be passively cooled and you'll need a real server for that. Even the old MI210 another poster sent is passive.

> Give me a single MI300X GPU in PCIe form factor for $20K and I'd very seriously consider. I'm sure there are many people who would help adapt the ecosystem if they were truly available.

I know this isn't what you're looking for entirely, but my business, Hot Aisle, is working on making MI300x available for rental. Our pricing isn't too crazy given that the GPU has 192GB and one week minimum isn't too bad. We will add on-demand hourly pricing as soon as we technically can.

I'm also pushing hard on Dell and AMD to pre-purchase developer credits on our hardware, that we can then give away to people who want to "kick the tires".

https://hotaisle.xyz/pricing/

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