Nvidia Blackwell is nothing short of a doomsday device

[crimsonaudio]

There was something that Huang said during the keynote that shocked me into a mild panic. Nvidia's Blackwell cluster, which will come with eight GPUs, pulls down 15kW of power. That's 15,000 watts of power. Divided by eight, that's 1,875 watts per GPU.

The current-gen Hopper data center chips draw up to 1,000W, so Nvidia Blackwell is nearly doubling the power consumption of these chips. Data center energy usage is already out of control, but Blackwell is going to pour jet fuel on what is already an uncontained wildfire.

Worse still, Huang said that in the future, he expects to see millions of these kinds of AI processors in use at data centers around the world.

One million Blackwell GPUs would suck down an astonishing 1.875 gigawatts of power. For context, a typical nuclear power plant only produces 1 gigawatt of power.

I watched Nvidia's Computex 2024 keynote and it made my blood run cold

Nvidia's pre-Computex keynote address was certainly something, and none of it felt good.

www.techradar.com

 

[Bamabuzzard]

This is going to sound snarky and sarcastic, but I don't mean it in that manner. Hence the reason I'm not putting in blue font. But our society loves to put people (both kids and adults) on a pedestal who are super intelligent aka "intellectuals". We almost make little "g" gods out of them. But this article reminds me that these types can also be the most destructive people in a society. The article basically alludes to that idea.

Great, someone is "brilliant", but it doesn't mean everything they say or do is right. "Smart folks" do stupid things just like the dumb ones in our society.

 

[NationalTitles18]

View attachment 42850


This is going to sound snarky and sarcastic, but I don't mean it in that manner. Hence the reason I'm not putting in blue font. But our society loves to put people (both kids and adults) on a pedestal who are super intelligent aka "intellectuals". We almost make little "g" gods out of them. But this article reminds me that these types can also be the most destructive people in a society. The article basicall alludes to that idea.

Great, someone is "brilliant", but it doesn't mean everything they say or do is right. "Smart folks" do stupid things just like the dumb ones in our society.

Good point, BB. Most often those people offer something something of tangible benefit in the now and promises of more later.

Problem is, they gloss over, ignore, downplay or believe that new advancements will compensate for the downsides of what they are promoting.

And since we are talking rich "industrialists" (job producers, really), they have power and can use it to foster trust that they often do not deserve.

Those types are just as - and in some cases - more dangerous than the often feared government officials (and most often control those in government anyway).

 

[Bamabuzzard]

Good point, BB. Most often those people offer something something of tangible benefit in the now and promises of more later.

Problem is, they gloss over, ignore, downplay or believe that new advancements will compensate for the downsides of what they are promoting.

And since we are talking rich "industrialists" (job producers, really), they have power and can use it to foster trust that they often do not deserve.

Those types are just as - and in some cases - more dangerous than the often feared government officials (and most often control those in government anyway).

An advancement "today" may be what creates a catastrophic situation in society years down the road. We're just not good at forward-thinking about possible unintended consequences and pumping the brakes on the advancement that would benefit society today. I'm definitely not considered an "intellectual" and even I have enough walking around sense to see the dangers we've created in a lot of the advancements we've implemented into our society and around the globe. But my guess, so have the people who have created these advancements. It's just hard to turn down the temptation of billions of dollars in your bank account.

 

[NationalTitles18]

An advancement "today" may be what creates a catastrophic situation in society years down the road. We're just not good at forward-thinking about possible unintended consequences and pumping the brakes on the advancement that would benefit society today. I'm definitely not considered an "intellectual" and even I have enough walking around sense to see the dangers we've created in a lot of the advancements we've implemented into our society and around the globe.

Lead in gasoline is a perfect example, but like many new advancements corporations and their shills covered up the known dangers in favor of profits.

And that is much if not all of the root of the problem - it's not about benefitting society even when it's sold that way. It's about enriching themselves, whatever the cost to other people - up to and including misery and death.

 

[Bamabuzzard]

Lead in gasoline is a perfect example, but like many new advancements corporations and their shills covered up the known dangers in favor of profits.

And that is much if not all of the root of the problem - it's not about benefitting society even when it's sold that way. It's about enriching themselves, whatever the cost to other people - up to and including misery and death.

Oh yeah, the desire for riches and power has been our downfall since the beginning of time. Every society has this dynamic present in some form. Get a group of people together, regardless of size, sit back and watch, and at some point, people will start doing things to benefit themselves and to hell with the group.

 

[Jon]

I watched Nvidia's Computex 2024 keynote and it made my blood run cold

Nvidia's pre-Computex keynote address was certainly something, and none of it felt good.

www.techradar.com

I haven't built a Super Computer since the early 2000's. Actually cracked the top 500 list once back in 2005 with one I built for a research University had another that I had a hand in that was classified that I believe was much more powerful. They've always been overkill for many use cases but not all. The last one I built for the University was a pure vanity project for a CIO who wanted to brag they didn't even really have a clear idea what to use it for which made it very hard to spec out. Worst part is that so many of these are that way and are just wasting resources to waste resources while some are doing fundamental research that has directly impacted our lives for the better. Would love the waste cleared up for sure but I also know well that much of the cancer fighting drugs, new MRNA vaccines and such things are directly a result of super computers. I also think about the impact of using these machines to calculate nuclear explosion yields over the years, we don't need to test bomb designs and haven't in decades because we can safely simulate them in machines. Complex issue makes me think of this scene

 

[TexasBama]

I watched Nvidia's Computex 2024 keynote and it made my blood run cold

Nvidia's pre-Computex keynote address was certainly something, and none of it felt good.

www.techradar.com

From the article “One million Blackwell GPUs would suck down an astonishing 1.875 gigawatts of power.”

for contrast, there is 2.5 gigawatts of power usage for bitcoin mining - just in Texas

 

[crimsonaudio]

From the article “One million Blackwell GPUs would suck down an astonishing 1.875 gigawatts of power.”

for contrast, there is 2.5 gigawatts of power usage for bitcoin mining - just in Texas

Wait until those bitminers get ahold of the Blackwells...

 

[TexasBama]

Wait until those bitminers get ahold of the Blackwells...

Do the miners need those sort of gpus? Idk

Alcoa had an aluminum smelter In Rockdale (roughly halfway between Austin and College Station) that was shutdown several years ago. The miners moved in there since the grid there is good for big power usage. I think that one site draws about 150 MW

 

[crimsonaudio]

Do the miners need those sort of gpus? Idk

They primarily use GPUs - in fact, the demand for nvidia GPUs caused there to be quite a shortage of video cards a while back. Nvidia wrote some code into their firmware to try to slow the the process of bitmining, but the users found a workaround.

 

[crimsonaudio]

Do the miners need those sort of gpus? Idk

Digging a little deeper, its not yet clear if the Blackwell GPU will be as cost effective as typical (operationally less expensive) GPUs due to it's higher power requirements:

https://www.ccn.com/news/technology/nvidia-blackwell-chip-bitcoin-mining/