The flaw with hard drives comes with large pools. The recovery speed is simply too slow when a drive fails, unless you build huge pools. So you need additional drives for more parity.
I don’t know who cares about shelf life. Drives spin all their lives, which is 5-10 years. Use M-Disk or something if you want shelf life.
I agree with you, mostly. Margins in the datacenter are thin for some players. Not Nvidia, they are at like 60% pure profit per chip, including software and RnD. That will have an effect on how we design stuff in the next few years.
I think we’ll need both ”GPU” and traditional CPUs for the foreseeable future. GPU-style for bandwidth or compute constrained workloads and CPU-style for latency sensitive workloads or pointer chasing. Now, I do think we’ll slap them both on top of the same memory, APU-style á la MI300A.
That is, as long as x86 has the single-threaded advantage, RISC-V won’t take over that marked, and as long as GPUs have higher bandwidth, RISC-V won’t take over that market.
Finally, I doubt we’ll see a performant RISC-V chip from China the next decade - they simply lack the EUV fabs. From outside of China, maybe, but the demand isn’t nearly as large.
I get the analogy, but it’s more like you have an old version of the software that can’t defend you against the newer fancier stuff. Continuous cat and mouse game.
Not economical. Storage is already done on far larger fab nodes than CPUs and other components. This is a case where higher density actually can be cheaper. ”Mature” nodes are most likely cheaper than the ”ancient” process nodes simply due to age and efficiency. (See also the disaster in the auto industry during covid. Car makers stopped ordering parts made on ancient process nodes, so the nodes were shut down permanently due to cost. After covid, fun times for automakers that had to modernise.)
Go compare prices, new NVMe M.2 will most likely be cheaper than SATA 2.5” per TB. The extra plastic shell, extra shipping volume and SATA-controller is that difference. 3.5” would make it even worse. In the datacenter, we are moving towards ”rulers” with 61TB available now, probably 120TB soon. Now, these are expensive, but the cost per TB is actually not that horrible when compared to consumer drives.
Tape will survive, SSDs will survive. Spinning rust will die
Nope. Larger chips, lower yields in the fab, more expensive. This is why we have chiplets in our CPUs nowadays. Production cost of chips is superlinear to size.
It’s not the packaging that costs money or limits us, it’s the chips themselves. If we crammed a 3.5” form factor full of flash storage, it would be far outside the budgets of mortals.
Why? We can cram 61TB into a slightly overgrown 2.5” and like half a PB per rack unit.
# echo ”SELINUX=enforcing” > /etc/selinux/conf
# echo ”SELINUXTYPE=mls >> /etc/selinux/conf
# reboot
Come on, it will be fun!
Yeah, American research is absolutely screwed.
It’s your country, your attempt at a democratic system and your mess to deal with internally. That it’s a fundamentally broken system you have over there has been known (and in some cases mathematically proven) for a long time now. Personally, I’m getting tired of the ”Not all americans”-stuff. It kinda worked the first time around, but you had four years to deal with him peacefully through your legal system, demonstrations, manifestations and public pressure. He got reelected and there was a peaceful transition of power, possibly the last.
Enough people voted for him. The margins weren’t even that thin. You are now represented by President Orange in your international affairs and force projection. We can’t really help you that much either, as you have positioned yourselves as a dominant global power, with economical, soft and hard power.
My entirely unqualified guess - we’ll start accepting political refugees from the US, fearing for their lives, fairly soon. I’m guessing LGBTQ+, some ethnicities, some scientists and some public servants are in the danger zone. Stop being ”horrified” and start being ”absolutely fucking terrified”.
In short, go deal with your carrot man, we can’t do it for you. We can hopefully provide some refuge. But we can only deal with you as a nation, represented by Trump. Sorry.
See for example the storage systems from Vast or Pure. You can increase window size for compression and dedup far smaller blocks. Fast random IO also allows you to do that ”online” in the background. In the case of Vast, you also have multiple readers on the same SSD doing that compression and dedup.
So the feature isn’t that special. What you can do with it in practice changes drastically.