We don't need no stinkin' Data Centers. The Diner rolls its own.
Seriously, the world has too much money to invest because a growth slowdown does that. It is in the math, and it happens when limits are reached. Money collects in piles to grow, but without overall economic growth a money pile can't grow itself. At least to the stratospheric level of unearned riches. It piles up but can't grow. It gets hungry.
Hungry money created an imagined need for 'compute,' resulting in the biggest bubble of all time. Bubbles only happen in a bizarre world where a parasitic class reaps profit without contributing, but that is a story for another day. The point is that we are in a financial bubble that will either collapse or put god to shame with the brilliance of man. It is up to you to decide which is more likely.
Were society organized differently using sane ideas, universities could have supplied models to play with. And the evolution of the state of the art would have been developed on existing hardware, with new hardware built only as the organic need called for it, sans speculation and bad investment.
There are plenty of people like me who could make this stuff useful. A pair of RTX 6000 cards at a reasonable price would help. Currently, that pair would cost $24,000—somewhere in that ballpark. What I was able to do with $1,000 gives one-sixth the 'compute' capacity at half the speed, something like that. And the memory in this machine should not be worth over $4,000.
We have the fucking Borg taking over
, and I have to pay through the nose to have any fun.Once again, convenience, inequality, and the accompanying foolishness kicks sagacity to the curb.
And previous generations had ignorance as an excuse. The highly educated 21st century cretin can't say that.
South Sea Bubble (1720): the trade-riches story was a cover for a debt swap
South Sea shares ran from about 128 pounds in January 1720 to roughly 1,000 by August, then crashed to 100-200 by December. The real business was never trade. It was converting the national debt.
Then it was to convert the national debt. It is to fund a new royalty based on financial conquest now. In the land of amnesia, Americans now prefer being exploited to being free, showing that a lot can change in 250 years.
Regarding the performance of the system, I am happy. I am impressed with the results, and playing with this thing is going to keep me busy for a very long time, even without system upgrades. A single RTX 5090 would do as well as this system, and it would be faster. But an RTX 5090 currently is selling for eight times what a single RTX 5060 Ti card with half the VRAM costs.
Going with two cheaper cards yielding the same VRAM made sense. I can deal with the speed penalty. The 5060 is a slower card, but the complication of two cards is something I would have done anyway. Even with a 5090 I would keep one of the 5060 cards. That would be interesting. Sometimes they would work together, and sometimes they would not. Together, the speed could slow down to 5060 speeds, but in that configuration, the added VRAM would be there for a reason. I could use it for added context (short-term memory) when appropriate.
A fascinating configuration would be two RTX 5090 cards running together, which makes no financial sense, but which would work fine provided they were running a model that could not run without overflow on a single card and which would fill the cards without unused VRAM. The PCI bus would bottleneck power draw in that case, and a circuit breaker would not pop. Since getting both cards working on independent tasks where they both draw full power would require deliberate effort, the system would be stable. A breaker would only pop if both cards ran at 100%, and that would require programming. When cards idle, they don't use a lot of power, and some models use more power than others when they run.
The PCI bottleneck is minimal in this system and is a deliberate choice. This motherboard is intended for AI use. If the A.I. bubble bursts and I can pick up some enterprise-class cards cheap, that would rock.