What would you Use A $3,000 Supercomputer for?

[james.hendrickson]

All,

I found this looking around on social media.

Basically NVIDIA is developing a super computer with 1,000x the power of a regular laptop.

https://x.com/rowancheung/status/1876565516698980503

Thats a LOT of computing power, like a LOT. The thing is managed by AI and NVIDIA uses it to run several of their internal corporate processes.

They'll likely be making this commercially available for sale. My question is...how could you make money with a massive super computer?

[Tabs]

The RTX 5090 is slated to be $2000 USD MSRP, so, an enhanced card going to $3000 doesn't seem all that far out there.

I can't help but feel as though AI is being over-generously thrown around like a marketing catch-phrase.

What the 5000 series cards are going to leverage is DLSS 4.x, with 4x frame generation (which is to say 1/4 actual rendered frames with 3/4 AI-generated fake frames filled in between the rendered frames).

Speaking only for myself, it's getting to a point where the resolution and frame rates of these cards (and monitors) are getting far beyond what I can normally perceive with my own naked eyes. Therefore, spending thousands of dollars more at it doesn't make any sense to me. Right now, I am very content having things run at roughly 60 FPS on a 2k resolution....

[ua_guy]

Honestly have no idea for personal use. It makes me disappointed that I didn't get in on NVDA a long time ago! In general I think it keeps going up from here...

In some ways I feel like we're all sitting back in ~1986, wondering why most of us would ever need a computer IN our homes, like what could they really do for us? lol. Now it's 2025 and I have no idea what a supercomputer could do for me.

[EasyMoney00]

Is anyone here running windows 95 OS on their everyday computer? Would you even be able to browse to this site with chrome or Firefox with such an old OS? Probably unlikely you could even install those apps on such an old operating system. This machine may be ahead of it's time but in 15 years, we all may need one to do basic tasks in the future.

I don't need one as of now but as long as Nvidias stock keep going up, I'm not complaining.

[bjl584]

This is way more than I would ever need. Unless you are doing crazy gaming, or some sort of animation, or maybe work in academia trying to solve complex math or astronomy questions, then you probably don't need this.

[james.hendrickson]

This is way more than I would ever need. Unless you are doing crazy gaming, or some sort of animation, or maybe work in academia trying to solve complex math or astronomy questions, then you probably don't need this.

BJ - what if you're doing micro trading or crypto mining? Or selling your computing power?

[ua_guy]

Folding, on a whole new level

[bjl584]

BJ - what if you're doing micro trading or crypto mining? Or selling your computing power?

Trading maybe.

This would be a bad rig to do crypto mining though. Even the world's most powerful supercomputer really wouldn't be ideal. You would need an ASIC computer for that. They are specifically designed to mine crypto.

[myrdale]

Folding, on a whole new level

Are you talking about Folding At Home? I ran that years ago.

My home computer is starting to show a little age now, 5 years old maybe? It has a 1080 which is crazy good for what I use it for. I built that machine to run VR. I played around with it some, but was more a novelty in the end. Playing with my nephew's Meta headset over Christmas holidays, it was an order of magnitude better than the HTC Vive, but it's also 5 years newer.

I do wonder when computers get fast enough to break the BitCoin/crypto in general.

[bjl584]

Are you talking about Folding At Home? I ran that years ago.

My home computer is starting to show a little age now, 5 years old maybe? It has a 1080 which is crazy good for what I use it for. I built that machine to run VR. I played around with it some, but was more a novelty in the end. Playing with my nephew's Meta headset over Christmas holidays, it was an order of magnitude better than the HTC Vive, but it's also 5 years newer.

I do wonder when computers get fast enough to break the BitCoin/crypto in general.

I've only skimmed the surface on crypto mining, but the algorithm gets harder to solve as more computing power is thrown at it and as time goes by.
So, like real mining, the first blocks of the bitcoin were easy to get, but they are becoming increasingly more difficult to mine now.

[ua_guy]

I have a hard time imagining how I'd put to use more computing power than I have today. I run a MacBook pro which is a few years old. One of the reasons for upgrading was to drive two 27" IPS displays at 4k each, for nothing more than viewing comfort while working at the computer. I can still tell the difference between 1080 and 4k. Harder to tell the difference between 4k and higher, diminishing returns. The displays were not cheap, and they are excellent for viewing video, primarily all my car hobbies and channels I like on Youtube. My MacBook has a fan in it, and I've heard it run exactly once while querying a database I was working on locally, which was massive. I don't game anymore, no VR stuff, all that just wasn't interesting to me anymore. I do have a 4k GoPro that I've used on 4x4 adventures. I've discovered I like taking video, as in sticking the camera to the window while I'm on trails. I don't enjoy editing video...buying that camera was kind of a waste, as the footage gets saved off and then I don't do anything with it.

Unless there becomes a need or serious financial incentive to personally mine crypto or something.... I just can't think of what even more computing power could be used for at home.

[myrdale]

I do have some AutoCad software, Inventor / Plant 3D which could definitely benefit from it.

Video editing would be another possible use case.