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Comment by logifail | Hacker News Reader

> How different is this from rental car companies changing over their fleets?

New generations of GPUs leapfrog in efficiency (performance per watt) and vehicles don't? Cars don't get exponentially better every 2–3 years, meaning the second-hand market is alive and well. Some of us are quite happy driving older cars (two parked outside our home right now, both well over 100,000km driven).

If you have a datacentre with older hardware, and your competitor has the latest hardware, you face the same physical space constraints, same cooling and power bills as they do? Except they are "doing more" than you are...

Would we could call it "revenue per watt"?

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The traditional framing would be cost per flop. At some point your total costs per flop over the next 5 years will be lower if you throw out the old hardware and replace it with newer more efficient models. With traditional servers that's typically after 3-5 years, with GPUs 2-3 years sounds about right

The major reason companies keep their old GPUs around much longer with now are the supply constraints

The used market is going to be absolutely flooded with millions of old cards. I imagine shipping being the most expensive cost for them. The supply side will be insane.

Think 100 cards but only 1 buyer as a ratio. Profit for ebay sellers will be on "handling", or inflated shipping costs.

eg shipping and handling.

I assume NVIDIA and co. already protects themselves in some way, either by the fact of these cards not being very useful after resale, or requiring them to go to the grinder after they expire.

Cards don't "expire". There are alternate strategies to selling cards, but if they don't sell the cards, then there is no transfer of ownership, and therefore NVIDIA is entering some form of leasing model.

If NVIDIA is leasing, then you can't get use those cards as collateral. You can't also write off depreciation. Part of what we're discussing is that terms of credit are being extended too generously, with depreciation in the mix.

The could require some form of contractual arrangement, perhaps volume discounts for cards, if they agree to destroy them at a fixed time. That's very weird though, and I've never heard of such a thing for datacenter gear.

They may protect themselves on the driver side, but someone could still write OSS.

Dont they own socket for enterprise cards? I can't see consumers buying these card unless they are PCIE at the very least.

In the late '90s, when CPUs were seeing the advances of GPUs are now seeing, there wasn't much of a market for two/three-year old CPUs. (According to a graph I had Gemini create, the Pentium had 100 MFLOPS and the Pentium 4 had 3000 MFLOPS.) I bought motherboards that supported upgrading, but never bothered, because what's the point of going from 400 MHz to 450 MHz, when the new ones are 600 or 800 MHz?

I don't think nVidia will have any problem there. If anything, hobbyists being able to use 2025 cards would increase their market by discovering new uses.

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