[HN Gopher] What Nvidia's Blackwell efficiency gains mean for DC...
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       What Nvidia's Blackwell efficiency gains mean for DC operators
        
       Author : rntn
       Score  : 34 points
       Date   : 2024-03-27 15:31 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
        
       | gwbas1c wrote:
       | "DC" is very confusing here. "DC" normally means "Direct
       | Current," not "Data Center."
       | 
       | I recommend updating the title. (And if anyone has connections
       | back to The Register, suggest that they update the original
       | article too.)
        
         | ginko wrote:
         | Could also mean operators from the District of Columbia.
        
       | astrodust wrote:
       | At what point do you use the waste heat to generate electricity?
       | 
       | 120KW is not an insignificant amount of energy.
        
         | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
         | I'm not sure it falls under cogeneration but I suppose it might
         | if your waste heat can be captured and used to power the GPUs.
         | 
         | https://www.energy.gov/eere/iedo/combined-heat-and-power-bas...
        
         | aaronblohowiak wrote:
         | I am not a physicist. In my (mis)understanding of things, the
         | work you can make heat do comes from the difference in
         | temperature, with a bigger difference allowing more work to be
         | done efficiently. Unfortunately, the chips are kept pretty cool
         | in order to stay in their operating range, so you end up with a
         | large volume of warm but not hot stuff. This is hard to turn
         | into electricity. It can be good for things where you want
         | stuff to be warm (like heating homes, etc) but not great for
         | electricity generation.
        
           | namibj wrote:
           | Yeah it's basically not worth it with silicon to recreate
           | electricity. It's good for heat, though.
        
           | ryukoposting wrote:
           | Perhaps, instead of building them in deserts, we should be
           | building datacenters in cold places where the ambient
           | temperature inside the datacenter should be kept warmer than
           | outside air.
        
           | barryrandall wrote:
           | I think there's a lot of potential in combining immersion
           | cooling with utility-scale heat pumps. The heat from the
           | coolant isn't high enough to produce power on its own, but
           | it's constant.
        
       | kristianp wrote:
       | > saying it is 30x faster than the Hopper generation when
       | inferencing a 1.8 trillion parameter mixture-of-experts model.
       | 
       | Is that the size of gpt4? The upcoming systems seem designed to
       | fit gpt4 on one system with 4bit quantisation, making gpt4
       | cheaper to deliver.
        
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       (page generated 2024-03-27 23:02 UTC)