[HN Gopher] "Meta spent almost as much as the Manhattan Project ...
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"Meta spent almost as much as the Manhattan Project on GPUs in
today's dollars"
Author : paulpauper
Score : 34 points
Date : 2024-05-05 20:48 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| Arnt wrote:
| I think the overwhelming complexity of modern GPUs, CPUs, SoCs
| don't... overwhelm us.
|
| Compared to the process of producing a 3nm chip with all those
| billions of transistors, the Manhattan project isn't huge.
| Groundbreaking, sure. Huge, compared to the development of EUV
| wafers, no.
| wmf wrote:
| 10% is overwhelming complexity and 90% is Nvidia's profit
| margin.
| chx wrote:
| Perhaps it's worth mentioning some lesser known big
| achievements of the Manhattan Project. It's not the scientists.
| It's Hanford and Oak Ridge. Hanford was not only nuclear
| reactors but a city of more than 43 000 people out of literally
| nothing. Oak Ridge had the largest building in the world, K-25.
| It was only surpassed by the Boeing Everett Factory more than
| twenty years later. These two sites were also the major cost
| centers of the project. Science is cheap. Enriching uranium and
| manufacturing plutonium -- especially when no one did it before
| -- is not.
| Gare wrote:
| > Science is cheap.
|
| Indeed. Sustained nuclear chain reaction was achieved in
| Chicago Pile-1 beneath the stands of campus football stadium
| at the end of 1942. That's when, scientifically, it was
| proven that the bomb is possible.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| TIL; I didn't know the Manhattan project used GPUs in the first
| place.
| Cyphase wrote:
| Of course; how else were they going to make the bomb without a
| bunch of Genius Physics Utilizers?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Hopefully people can appreciate that a modern GPU is an
| achievement of physics and technology on par with the Manhattan
| project. EUV lithography is way off the end of the complexity
| scale. They had to make a bomb that was perfectly round, these
| days we have to make assemblies that are perfectly flat.
| afruitpie wrote:
| I'm surprised how "cheap" the Manhattan Project and Apollo
| Program were.
|
| It's bizarre we put people on the Moon in the '60s for an amount
| of money similar to Apple's recent stock buybacks.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I think this comic says it all:
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuJMkjIXcAcRru9?format=jpg
| dontreact wrote:
| It's the difference between doing something transcendental a
| small number of times and doing something amazing billions of
| times.
| 4death4 wrote:
| All this should tell you is that inflation is vastly under-
| counted.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| The US was much poorer back then. Much lower standard of
| living. So wages were also much lower even inflation-corrected.
| Also there was a war going in and people were drafted and had
| no choice but to work for a minimal salary. I think that
| explains a lot of it.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I suspect it's because inflation has been underestimated for
| the past ~hundred years. Over time, that really compounds.
|
| A fairer way to look at it is how many years of the average
| citizens salary is it.
|
| The manhattan project was $2B in 1944, or 121,000 median-
| family-years of work using salary figures from the 1940 census.
|
| Apples stock buyback was $110B in 2024, or 122,910 median-
| family-years of work using figures from the 2022 census.
|
| So, the inflation figures under represent the cost by a factor
| of 3.5 over those 80 years.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Average family has a ton more in material goods, both in
| quality and quantity.
|
| So it isn't that inflation is underestimated. The average
| family truly is richer. Far more house. Far more car. Far
| more and better food.
| xeckr wrote:
| That's about 0.1 Apollo programs.
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| I'm always amazed by the quality and craft of works produced in
| the periods before roughly the 1960s. Not sure what changed so
| drastically about society around that time to make modern times
| so wasteful, slow, expensive, and unambitious but if we could go
| back, I would
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have my theories, but it's probably best that I keep them to
| myself, and do my best on my projects.
| vundercind wrote:
| Professional management class. Various major reforms toward
| "more efficient" management, first in manufacturing and such,
| then applied to knowledge work. Reduced specialization when it
| comes specifically to bureaucratic tasks in white collar work
| (everyone's their own secretary, among other things, now--even
| doctors)
| 121789 wrote:
| Cheaper labor, less opportunity to have negative impact, and
| you're also probably biased and not looking for the projects
| that failed
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Survivorship bias. Plenty of failures, incompetence,
| corruption, and stupidity before.
|
| But it fades into history.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| TSMC's accomplishments are just greater than putting some TNT
| around enriched uranium
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