MAMLM: The beast weighs 3000 lbs. 150 x 20 = 3000 chips. A total of perhaps 600 trillion transistors. At normal chip prices-per-transistor these days, that would be under $1,000,000. Apple and Wal-Mart, after all, are now selling a full M1 16-billion transistor laptop for $699. But people who might know are saying “low eight figures” or “custom quote”. Maybe the anomaly—given demand—is not that NVIDIA’s current margins are so high but that they are so low, that it is not trying to squeeze all the juice but is instead doing favors in the hopes of gaining goodwill that will be useful in the future:

Charlie Stross: ‘The Nvidia DGX GB200 server of 2024 consumes 120kW of power, about the same as the Cray-1 supercomputer of 1975. The Cray-1 cost $7.9M and ran at 160 MFLOPS. The GB200 runs at 1.44 exaFLOPS, or roughly ten billion times the power. But you can network 8 of these racks together, and AWS is building Project Ceiba around 20,736 of the CPUs (there are 72 CPUs per DGX server rack). 10 billion times more performance per watt, in 49 years… <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1> <theregister.com/2024/03/21/nvidia_dgx_g…> <mastodon.social/@cstross@wandering.shop…>