LAB NOTES JEREMY LAIRD, CONTRIBUTOR
Falling behind the curve
Why AI is going to make our PCs a bit dumber
IN THIS JOB,
half the fun is playing with cutting-edge kit, the latest CPUs and GPUs with the most advanced silicon in the world. But thanks to AI, I’ve got a feeling that’s not going to be the case for much longer. The problem is that there’s just too much money to be made from inferencing chips for AI.
It’s recently been alleged, for instance, that it costs Nvidia about $3,000 to bang out its new H100 AI inferencing GPU. But it’s sold to customers for something in the region of $25,000 to $30,000, depending on who is paying and how many they’re buying. As Nvidia’s Jensen Huang recently said, the more you buy, the more you save.