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160 points redohmy | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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hypeatei ◴[] No.46009445[source]
Well, patience as a consumer might pay off in the next year or so when the music stops and hyperscalers are forced to dump their inventories.

There still isn't a clear path to profitability for any of these AI products and the capital expenditure has been enormous.

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1. cesarb ◴[] No.46009834[source]
> Well, patience as a consumer might pay off in the next year or so when the music stops and hyperscalers are forced to dump their inventories.

Their inventories are not what consumers use.

Consumer DDR5 motherboards normally take UDIMMs. Server DDR5 motherboards normally take RDIMMs. They're mechanically incompatible, and the voltages are different. And the memory for GPUs is normally soldered directly to the board (and of the GDDRn family, instead of the DDRn or LPDDRn families used by most CPUs).

As for GPUs, they're also different. Most consumer GPUs are PCIe x16 cards with DP and HDMI ports; most hyperscaler GPUs are going to have more exotic form factors like OAM, and not have any DP or HDMI ports (since they have no need for graphics output).

So no, unfortunately hyperscalers dumping their inventories would be of little use to consumers. We'll have to wait for the factories to switch their production to consumer-targeted products.

Edit: even their NVMe drives are going to have different form factors like E1.S and different connectors like U.2, making them hard for normal consumers to use.