> I used to salivate over computers. News of the next most-powerful processor or RAM upgrade was irresistible for a period of my life.
I can relate to that. Of course I'd love to have an 8-way Xeon Platinum with a terabyte of RAM (so I could use Slack) to run Emacs and my terminal sessions, but I can't really justify that. To say nothing about the noise.
Or build a Cray-2 shaped box with a beefy GPU on each of its 11 lobes immersed in Novec bubbling like a real Cray 2.
Or a Connection Machines CM-2a-like box with 16 boards hosting 8 RPi-like boards each with each core/thread lighting up one of 32 LEDs on the front. Or fewer SBCs on each if I figure out how to light up LEDs based on SIMD usage in them - 128 nodes is quite a lot.
I deeply admire the art that goes into making a Rome, a POWER9, a 28-core Xeon or an IBM z15. I designed a stack-based CPU in college and I know how hard it is to get everything in place. It's just that I have no use for any of that. Quite frankly, my Xeon tower server is almost 90% idle at any given time, its memory almost completely deserted, as is my Core i3 and my Celeron laptops.
I used to be the same way; I'd pore over data sheets and whatever else, I wanted to optimize _everything_.
Then one day, I dunno, I snapped. I think some minor tweak broke something and I just gave up. I wanted to not care about it ever again.
As it happens, I ended up buying a Mac, but I imagine you could just as easily get the same effect with Windows. The trend continued with iPhone and iPad; I don't care about specs, other than "can this hold my pics and music" or "can this run the 5 tools I need to work".
I guess I only started caring about specs again when Apple introduced broken-by-design keyboards and the ridiculous touchbar. Somehow that snapped me, again. Like suddenly someone put a tack on my comfy seat.
I like your "dream machines" - reminds me of one of mine:
8 stacked cube ThermalTake V1 aka megacube (supposedly they are designed to do this)
best mini-itx mobo in each with highest-end CPU per and max RAM; 7 as netboot, 1 as master
highest-end NVidia GPU in the master, with the remainder filled with the best NVidia TPUs or whatever instead of video cards
fans and lights as needed/wanted
Essentially to end up with one helluva nice TensorFlow box.
I just can't justify the space, power, cost, etc that it would take to build such a beast. It would really be "for show" because it honestly could be made much smaller with probably better cooling and such with a proper case.
I haven't really priced it out - just a dream that will remain so.
Now - on a different level - and something I do intend to try - is what I call my "Poor man's Jetson TX" design:
Basically take a cheap Mini-ITX motherboard, drop a decent CPU in it (something fast with 4-8 cores), put 8-16 gig of RAM in it, then take a NVidia 750 TI SC Mini and mount it horizontally over the CPU and such (use a 1U server cooler for the CPU), using one of those flexible PCIe x16 risers. I've got all the parts to try it.
It would be nice for running models for an embedded system, and costs way less than the real deal. I don't think it's as powerful, but I think it would come close. Nor maybe not as efficient - not sure. But cheap - very cheap.
I can relate to that. Of course I'd love to have an 8-way Xeon Platinum with a terabyte of RAM (so I could use Slack) to run Emacs and my terminal sessions, but I can't really justify that. To say nothing about the noise.
Or build a Cray-2 shaped box with a beefy GPU on each of its 11 lobes immersed in Novec bubbling like a real Cray 2.
Or a Connection Machines CM-2a-like box with 16 boards hosting 8 RPi-like boards each with each core/thread lighting up one of 32 LEDs on the front. Or fewer SBCs on each if I figure out how to light up LEDs based on SIMD usage in them - 128 nodes is quite a lot.
I deeply admire the art that goes into making a Rome, a POWER9, a 28-core Xeon or an IBM z15. I designed a stack-based CPU in college and I know how hard it is to get everything in place. It's just that I have no use for any of that. Quite frankly, my Xeon tower server is almost 90% idle at any given time, its memory almost completely deserted, as is my Core i3 and my Celeron laptops.