Rural is complicated. You have more distance between subscribers, but it's much more likely to just be grass which you can mole plough into for about a tenth of the cost per metre of digging up sidewalk.
I don't know about New York specifically but I do know laying new duct in central London is more expensive than it should be because the sidewalks are mostly now full. You need to close roads and track down them which is more expensive because you have to go deeper and you pay the city per day for the closure.
The one thing that has enabled fibre deployment here is that the incumbent is forced to allow other ISPs to rent space for a regulated price in thier existing ducts. In Switzerland I believe init7 benefit from the same principle but the incumbent rents the fibres themselves not duct space.
The only thing America needs to do is compromise the property rights of AT&T or build out city owned ducting. It's a bit socialist I guess, but look, it works.
I kind of a agree, but it's not going to happen for a long long time. The practicalities are just a nightmare.
How do I power an access point with fiber? Ok we add an AC wall socket to the ceiling but now we need a 'brick' to convert to DC. How do I remotely hard reboot an access point if it were to crash?
Fiber termination requires a fusion splicer and a trained engineer, sharps box etc. The power socket needs an electrician. It's just such a nightmare in comparison, install is going to be more expensive, longer to fix faults, less flexible to move a socket etc
M3 ultra is obviously 1-2 generations behind and new the studio is expected 'any day now. Even if this was M4 Ultra it would still be ~comparable to any EPYC system in bandwidth, but get to use the GPU for compute so potentially faster than the EPYC. Total Cost of Ownership in the Epyc is going to be WAY higher because of electricity costs, the EYPC is going to be consuming probably 5X the electricity and is probably not going to sit quietly on your desk. More RAM though, but again it's more about the ratio of RAM (size) to RAM (Memory Bandwith) to Compute and you may find a model bigger than e.g 70b suddenly is bottlenecked by the CPUs or memory bandwidth and therefore the extra RAM (size) is wasted. But maybe not, different use cases will yeild different results I guess.
> A barebones 2S system with no CPUs or memory is ~$2000, a pair of 16 core CPUs another ~$1000 each, and then however much memory you want.
As you say, the thing is it's not 'however much memory you want' it's 24 sticks which at $300 a stick for 16GB is $7200, then you also need at least one NVME disk so you're looking at what $13,000?
Yeah kind of, I think a 24 channels DDR5 works out approx 1TB/s, but the cost is astronomical, a M5 studio would probably beat that performance for around half the cost. You also get to use the GPU/NPU cores of the mac vs CPU only on the servers.
M5 ultra studio with 128GB RAM could probably beat out a sever with a RTX 6000 pro at half the price.
I don't think it's needs 'call us' just a separate SKU, I mean if they called it Xserve Ultra and it was just a studio in a 1u format with dual PSUs and extra RAM, it would fly off the shelves.
It uses 128b/132b encoding so 10Gb/s USB ≈ 9.69Gb/s you do then have USB framing overhead but it's probably around 2% on typical 1500B ethernet frames. So all in you are losing probably 5% or so to overhead.
I am of the opinion that 5Gbe is a much more sensible speed for a laptop adapter right now as it uses half the power and can obviously run full wack on 10Gb/s USB so you're looking at like 5Gbe vs ~9.4Gbe.
You would use a heat exchanger normally anyway. Forcing the outside (DH) to be slow would get you that, but there is cost in having low flow in that HXs are less efficient at the far end and you can transfer less heat in the same pipework (it would more than half the district heating capacity). So in practice, not really.
Yeah, I mean it does depend on the pipework and season/geography for sure. I was simplifying a bit in that a part of the 'distribution' losses are in the plate heat exchanger as you convert from the "IT" loop to the "district heating" loop. The numbers are roughly right, potentially slightly worse in deep winter when it matters the most.
Yes, but the heat will still likely need boosting by about a further 10 degrees either at the source or end user.
DC inlet is 45°C, outlet is 55°C assuming a 10°C ΔT. By the time that's travelled 500m–1km through pipework you've lost a few degrees, so you're arriving at the HIU at maybe 50–52°C. The home radiator circuit then takes that down by around say 12°C, returning ~38°C. Factor in pipe losses on the return leg and you're back at the data centre with maybe 35°C inlet rather than 45°C — meaning the DC output is now only 45°C rather than 55°C, and the whole system gradually degrades each cycle. You could address this by mixing some hot output back into the return to keep the DC inlet stable at 45°C, but eh.
Yeah, this is part of the issue to be honest. You'd need outdoor air to be below ~37°C to guarantee 45°C water outlet temperature. In most locations you still need cooling towers or compressors some of the time, so you still have to build all the infrastructure that comes with them; though reducing their use is still great, saving serious amounts of water or energy.
For e.g you might think of the outskirts of London as fairly moderate, but this week it's been hot enough that supplemental cooling would likely have been needed at points. For a data centre here you'd typically design the cooling system to cope with outdoor temps in excess of 40°C, which is not a conservative number anymore.
Also, while Nvidia might be happy with you supplying water at 45°C I suspect you will get better longevity of the hardware at lower temps like say 35°C. GPUs are expensive, and extending longevity may well be 'worth' a bit more water or energy to you. In practice you are also likely to have air cooled systems that sit 'beside' the AI compute like storage severs, any extra CPU compute and network switches. So you are likely to need a separate room and cooling system for that. Great progress though.
Many smaller providers have reasonable price/features but you need to dig in a comparison site or just generally to find them I guess. Like e.g serversearcher.com serverhunter etc
I don't know about New York specifically but I do know laying new duct in central London is more expensive than it should be because the sidewalks are mostly now full. You need to close roads and track down them which is more expensive because you have to go deeper and you pay the city per day for the closure.
The one thing that has enabled fibre deployment here is that the incumbent is forced to allow other ISPs to rent space for a regulated price in thier existing ducts. In Switzerland I believe init7 benefit from the same principle but the incumbent rents the fibres themselves not duct space.
The only thing America needs to do is compromise the property rights of AT&T or build out city owned ducting. It's a bit socialist I guess, but look, it works.