The cluster seems to have already drawn attention, with 11 people reportedly watching the eBay listing and one prospective buyer already letting it sit in their cart. I guess the real question is not whether it will sell, but whether the buyer will choose $50 overnight shipping.
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Zhiye Liu News Editor, RAM Reviewer & SSD Technician Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
pf100 In the future, for the plebs (we're the plebs here), we're going to have to form gamer coalitions where we pool our money to buy a datacenter and then strip the GPU cores and make our own gpu's out of the parts. Reply
usertests pf100 said: In the future, for the plebs (we're the plebs here), we're going to have to form gamer coalitions where we pool our money to buy a datacenter and then strip the GPU cores and make our own gpu's out of the parts. On the other hand, the future is bright for gaming on 11 year old integrated graphics. I7pSE2fLjsI OzmM9dFnJMs Reply
PEnns usertests said: On the other hand, the future is bright for gaming on 11 year old integrated graphics. I7pSE2fLjsI OzmM9dFnJMs The future (the past in this case) is so bright….I gotta wear shades…😊 OEH4jaQpOt4, list: RDOEH4jaQpOt4 Reply
bit_user pf100 said: In the future, for the plebs (we're the plebs here), we're going to have to form gamer coalitions where we pool our money to buy a datacenter and then strip the GPU cores and make our own gpu's out of the parts. You can usually find plenty of these parts being sold individually, on the used market. However, the sorts of GPUs they put on SXM cards, such as the A100's, can't be used for gaming. Everything after V100 has little or none of the hardware engines needed for interactive 3D graphics. Reply
Pierce2623 Yep the A100 might be technically “ampere” but it has very little in common with the gaming cards. As you mentioned, it has no actual render backend including ROPs etc. Aside from that it’s actually a different architecture from consumer Ampere and its also fabbed on TSMC N7 instead of that god-awful hot and inefficient Samsung 8nm node that was originally based in 12nm technology. Reply
bit_user Pierce2623 said: Yep the A100 might be technically “ampere” but it has very little in common with the gaming cards. As you mentioned, it has no actual render backend including ROPs etc. Aside from that it’s actually a different architecture from consumer Ampere and its also fabbed on TSMC N7 instead of that god-awful hot and inefficient Samsung 8nm node that was originally based in 12nm technology. I agree with everything you said, except that I think Anandtech reported that one of the SMs actually had the rendering fixed-function units and it might also have a display controller. So, it could technically be used on a card with a display output, but you'd get like iGPU-level performance in games. I never heard anything about H100, Bx00, or Rubin having any of that. So, A100 might've been the end of the line for anything you could put on a proper PCIe graphics card. Reply
DS426 bit_user said: You can usually find plenty of these parts being sold individually, on the used market. However, the sorts of GPUs they put on SXM cards, such as the A100's, can't be used for gaming. Everything after V100 has little or none of the hardware engines needed for interactive 3D graphics . Ah yes, so they aren't really GPU's anymore. Seems like Compute Accelerator Unit would be a more fitting name. One of those heavy inertia things I suppose. Reply
alan.campbell99 DS426 said: Ah yes, so they aren't really GPU's anymore. Seems like Compute Accelerator Unit would be a more fitting name. One of those heavy inertia things I suppose. Indeed, I really do think they shouldn't be called GPUs, your suggestion looks like a better descriptor. One of the first questions in my head when reading this was "Hmm, so how many of the compute units are functional, how badly have they been thrashed?" Some units that are in service are surely failing, we just aren't privy to that information afaik and related piffling details like how many of these sold Nvidia chips are actually in service and energised rather than gathering dust in a warehouse or unpowered AI datacentre. Reply
bit_user DS426 said: Ah yes, so they aren't really GPU's anymore. Seems like Compute Accelerator Unit would be a more fitting name. One of those heavy inertia things I suppose. Yeah, I sometimes try to call them compute accelerators, but it just depends on the context. Too many people know them as GPUs. Even Jensen tends to refer to them like that. Then again, when we're talking about chips like those from Tenstorrent, Google's TPUs, or OpenAI's Jalapeno, those have no GPU heritage and nothing about them is suited towards graphics. So, it really makes zero sense to call them GPUs and people generally don't. Reply
bit_user alan.campbell99 said: One of the first questions in my head when reading this was "Hmm, so how many of the compute units are functional, how badly have they been thrashed?" Some units that are in service are surely failing, we just aren't privy to that information Good points. They might be holding up just fine, but they could indeed be significantly degraded. They're not necessarily that old, since H100 shortages meant new A100s kept getting sold until as recently as like two years ago. The warranty on server hardware is usually like 5 years, but I don't know about A100's. And even if they're substantially newer than that, you can pretty much bet they've been getting run hard. On the bright side, they're probably getting dumped not because they're unstable, but just to make room for newer stuff. So, there's a good chance the vast majority of the hardware is still in good, working order. If I'm buying used datacenter gear for pennies on the dollar, that's just part of the game. But, if I'm paying like $5k per A100 card, I'd want to know that it was properly functioning when pulled. Reply
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Reference reading
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/it-vendor-lists-massive-usd60-million-ai-cluster-on-ebay-300x-racks-of-decommissioned-gpus-includes-9-600-nvidia-a100-gpus-and-4-200-amd-epyc-cpus-plus-free-shipping#main
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