this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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I don't know what they need so many GPUs for. There's 16 displays inside, and the sphere itself has fewer pixels than even 1 of the internal displays. You could probably run the sphere off a laptop if you aren't trying to do anything fancy.
Maybe they plan on doing crazy live simulations on it or something. I can't imagine what kind of displayed image would actually use all 150 of them. Nvidia A6000 cards are damn powerful.
Probably have a few cards running the displays and the rest of them mining some sphere-themed memecoin
I guess the practicality of the decision depends on the finances. Did they actually buy the cards or were they gifted by nvidia for free advertising?
It does seem suspiciously like they picked 150 completely arbitrarily to make the project sound impressive, when they could have easily done it with 20. I'm sure a bunch of people in the middle made a bunch of money off that transaction too. Or like you said, maybe this is Nvidia doing some guerrilla marketing
Pretty sure it's just for bragging rights.
You don't know. Full stop.
My job has been to run things on GPUs for almost 10 years now. The only thing anyone practical is doing on that many GPUs is AI training, massive scientific simulations, or crypto mining. 1 or 2 of them is enough to run something like ChatGPT.
Real-time graphics it turns out don't scale well across multiple GPUs. There's a reason SLI has gone away for consumer GPUs. At the current ratio, each of those $3000+ GPUs is only driving 8000 pixels (assuming each led puck is being used as 1 pixel, given their size). It makes no sense other than bragging rights