What happens to older datacenter GPUs? Do they have a second life somewhere outside of datacenters?
I could see Nvidia adding terms of sale requiring disposal rather than resale.
What happens to older datacenter GPUs? Do they have a second life somewhere outside of datacenters?
I could see Nvidia adding terms of sale requiring disposal rather than resale.
Plenty of enterprise server hardware (racks, servers, RAM, disks) does have an active secondhand market after 3-5 years of use, but I think GPUs are too specialized for it to be viable. I doubt anyone has the setup to run a H200 in their home rig.
I also don't think companies are going to have mandatory replacement cycles for GPU hardware the same way they do for everything else, because:
1. It is an order or magnitude (or more) more expensive.
2. It isn't clear whether Moore's law will apply to the AI GPU space the same way it has for everything else.
Unless Nvidia can launch a new chip every 2-3 years with massively improved performance-per-watt at a lower price no one is going to rush to recycle the old one.
> Unless Nvidia can launch a new chip every 2-3 years with massively improved performance-per-watt at a lower price no one is going to rush to recycle the old one.
That's exactly the point.
Performance/watt is increasing so much gen-to-gen that it makes no longer sense to run older hardware.
Not my words, Jensen's.
Are you saying that the person selling shovels thinks you should buy a new shovel? I guess they must be the expert.
So you are saying that the ceo of the company that builds the chips is saying that it makes sense to change them each generation?
When the warbirds are on the wing, sell anti-aircraft systems to both sides.
you can absolutely run e.g. datacenter-level A100 at home, there are adapters from the SXM to the PCIe socket. Haven't seen people running SXM versions of H100s this way but this could be due to the price factor only
Well by the time the become obsolete you can run that computing on a Mac with no special cooling so I really doubt they will be of any use. Maybe in some parts of the world where electricity is cheap. If someone wants to really find out perhaps watching the crypto ASICs stories could help.
Well technically true, I would wager that the home lab is going to require increasingly distinct and unusual adaptations to retrofit the hardware to home use.
New stuff is all liquid cooled by default and that's a paradigm shift for your average home lab.
I'm less aware of exactly what's happening on the power side of things but I think some of the architectures are now moving to relatively high voltage DC throughout and then down converting it to low voltage right before it's used. So not exactly just plug-and-play with your average nema15 outlet.
> I doubt anyone has the setup to run a H200 in their home rig.
There are PCIe versions of these right? And another comment is saying there are PCI adapters too. It "only" requires 600 to 700W. It's not out of reach for everybody.
If the used regular server market is any indication, you can find, after a few years, a lot of enterprise gear at totally discounted prices. CPU costing $4K brand new for $100 after a few years: stuff like that.
A friend has got a 42U rack and so do some homelab'ers. People have been running GPU farms mining cryptocurrencies or doing "transcoding" (for money).
It's not just CPUs at 1/40th of their brand new price: network gear too. And ECC RAM (before the recent RAM craze).
I'm pretty sure that if H200 begin to flood the used market, people shall quickly adapt.
> Unless Nvidia can launch a new chip every 2-3 years with massively improved performance-per-watt at a lower price no one is going to rush to recycle the old one.
I agree with that. But if they resell old H200s, people are resourceful and shall find a way to run these.
Would it even require a particularly high level of resourcefulness? Purchase the GPU along with the mobo that slots it. It's not as though companies typically swap out CPU and GPU while keeping the rest of the box.
The SXM mobo is huge because it takes 8 GPUs. It requires 10 kW of power etc.
You'd be better off with the SXM-PCIe adapters.
Where do you find such deals
Start on eBay and learn the off-lease companies, and start watching them directly.
K80's are up on eBay.
Last I checked AWS is still offering g4dn instances that run on NVIDIA T4 GPUs, which were first released in 2018. I think most people underestimate how long superscalers can keep these things running profitably after they depreciate, and you probably don’t want anything they throw away.
My last employer is still running a bunch of otherwise discontinued g3 instances with 2015 era GPUs.
It's likely the GPU boards are designed for water cooled data center racks and might not fit in a regular PC case. It's also possible the PCB the GPU's are mounted to might not be standard PCIe cards that fit into an ATX case.
I bought a used NEC SX Aurora TSUBASA (PCIe x16 board that looks like a GPU board) and realized it has no fans. The server case it is designed to fit into is pressurized by fans forcing air through eight cards on a special 4 + 4 slot motherboard. I have to stack and mount three 40mm fans on the back.
They are build to physically last 5-7 years in 24/7 datacenter use, but they have effective lifetime just 3-4 years, then their value has deprecated and electricity and infrastructure cost dominates. Meta did a benchmark where 9% of the chips failed every year, 'infant mortality' is much higher in the first 3 months of use.
9% is an absurd failure rate for solid state electronics. Particularly considering the profit margins. I assume it's related to the power densities involved. Would you happen to recall the source?
Depending on the elemental composition, it could definitely be worthwhile to recycle wherever scale is practical. For giant datacenters and companies using hundreds of thousands or millions of gpus, that adds up to a lot of gold and other valuable elements.
In order to take advantage of that, someone needs to be positioned to process all that material economically, and to make the logistics achievable by the big players. If it costs Facebook $10million to store and transport phased out gpus vs just sending them to a landfil, they're not going to do it. If they get $100k for recycling - probably not going to do it. If they pocket $5 million, they will definitely contract that out, especially if it costs $50 million to build out the infrastructure to handle it.
Probably a good company idea - transport, disposal, refurbishment of out of cycle GPUs and datacenter assets, creating a massive recycling pipeline for recapturing all the valuable elements is a pretty good niche.
We already have that. It's called ebay.
I've written about this elsewhere but I predict there will be a significant secondary market for repurposing parts of datacenter GPUs (for example, RAM chips) by desoldering them and soldering them onto new PCBs that fit PC/consumer use cases.
That might work to some extent with the DDR5 DIMMs connected to the CPUs, but is thoroughly impossible for the HBM DRAM stacks packaged with the GPUs.
I wish there to be an active market like what Gamer's Nexus covered in China:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI&t=1577s
in the States.
It's all about the cost of labor. In the US you could not find someone capable of soldering BGA chips for a price that makes sense doing.
We literally do not know because it hasn't been 5 years yet...
V100 and A100 are over 5 years old and you can find used ones on eBay.
It seems like GPUs with a high utilization rate (60%+) degrade after 1-3 years: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/datacenter-g...
Would be interested to know if others have takes on this.
I previously ran 150,000 AMD gpus in all conditions at 100% utilization for years. I currently have a multi-million $ cluster of enterprise AMD GPUs.
A couple real world points:
1. They generally don't just fail. More likely a repairable component on a board fails and you can send it out to be repaired.
2. For my current stuff, I have a 3 year pro support contract that can be extended. Anything happens, Dell goes and fixes it. We also haven't had someone in our cage at the DC in over 6 months now.
No affiliation (I wish), but: https://gptshop.ai
This site apparently sources ex-enterprise(-only) systems and puts them into desktop style enclosures.
You send them back to Nvidia or a third party e-waste recycler at end of life. Sometimes they're resold and reused, but my understanding is that most are eventually processed for materials.
Bin!!
Why would them sell it cheaper to the 2nd market??
It will hurt the sales of new ones. This is the way even with food, let alone technology. Don't expect to buy cheaper 2nd GPU any century soon.
The data center owners aren't the ones selling new GPUs.
They are selling access to GPU computation. Seeking their used GPUs would flood the market with cheap competitors using their old GPUs.
If the GPUs were competitive with their own, they wouldn't be selling them off.
This article misses the point that people are still actively running older compute.