Posted by rntn 10/28/2024
These cards will inevitably become worse than worthless when the increased running costs of older-generation hardware exceed the cost of buying next-generation hardware. At some point it won't make sense to use more electricity, more cooling, more rack space to run a hospice for old cards, when the same workload can be done easier, quicker, and cheaper on newer hardware, even after adding the cost of buying the new hardware.
The Xeons that used to cost $4000 can now be found on eBay for 1% of their original sticker price, because they're so unprofitable to run.
"The researchers point out that the weight of Nvidia's latest Blackwell platform in a rack system — designed for intensive LLM inference, training and data processing tasks — tips the scales at 1.36 tons, demonstrating how material-intensive GenAI can be"
While I certainly agree that old Xeons are selling for 1% of their original MSRP, it doesn't really seem like this disagrees with what I'm saying - if someone's buying it for 40$, that's not e-waste (yet). I do agree that eventually things can become e-waste if the initial savings are significantly offset by running costs. However it's not clear how much longer we're going to continue to see such large generational improvements in power efficiency or whether these GB200s will be entirely obsolete when such improvements eventually stop happening.
To your point on the P40, it's an eight year old card but fortunately Nvidia has a history of long term support (especially for "datacenter" GPUs). The Pascal series is still fully supported by the latest Nvidia driver and CUDA releases, and projects like llama.cpp are still fairly regularly adding performance optimizations for even Maxwell series GPUs!
Current V100/A100/H100/etc hardware families are not going to end up as e-waste anytime soon. In fact, compare used pricing (and demand) of GPUs to CPUs, RAM, disk, motherboards, etc from eight years ago... That hardware ends up in the trash/at e-waste recyclers much, much sooner (even with /r/homelab).