I am going to fly to Finland ;)

I m trying SailfishOS with the new Jolla Phone. Only a suitable choice for nerds I suppose, but that’s not an issue for me.

What off the shelf part is less expensive and can deliver that performance at 110 W TDP (CPU+GPU) in this form actor?

A system with CPU+GPU TDP of 110W at comparable (or better) performance, at this size, at comparable silence under full load? This thing is designed for the living room so this matters to more than a few.

This isn’t really a mass product like a (subsidised) PS5. Have a look at what a Ryzen Max 385 with 32 GB board costs. RAM is only a part of that SSD is another one (both went through the roof). They aren’t doubling the price but they certainly pushed it beyond 1000 USD/ EUR. They are also probably the reason why much less of the thing will be available than planned. Before the madness started, maybe Valve targeted 700-800 USD or so.

If you are talking about GPUs being only a small share of the overall total sum, bad news that the supporting infrastructure is also to a large extend tailor made for that very narrow use case. No one else will need such huge data center facilities designed specifically for GPUs, that includes also the non GPU components. And the infrastructure is the only thing of substance of this bubble. The models aren’t it. Open weight models are on the heels of the closed models. As soon as they are good enough for common applications, the business case for charging billions is slowly evaporating.

You are also mistaken, I am not worried about GPUs. I am merely stating that they and their server infrastructure (which is tailor made for them) are rapidly getting obsolete equipment by their nature and while the clock is ticking they are largely not even being used. This is fundamentally different from the dotcom and railway bubble.

Both rail and communication infrastructure lead to some useless connections but much of it was no useless, in both cases. GPUs are not bolted to the ground but they do become obsolete no matter if you deny it or not. The issue is that the real costs is in using GPUs is very different from these previous bubbles. Those obsolete GPUs will cause much higher operating costs than newer generations, to the point where they won’t be interesting to use even if you gave them away for free. To make matters worse, other infrastructure is much more flexible in its use, one can transport all sorts of things on railways, one can send all sorts of data on communication infrastructure. Those specialised GPUs aren’t very useful for anything other than a fairly narrow use case.

I think you do not fully appreciate the crazy amounts of GPUs we are talking about here. China has no massive real shortage of GPUs. They managed to get black market GPUs more or less directly from Nvidia just fine. Nor are European universities IT wastelands without compute capabilities. But even if they’d go crazy on expandig compute infrastructure with outdated power hungry GPUs, that would be barely more than a drop in the ocean. Nvidia does have to resort to circular financing to keep the boom cycle accelerating, with GPUs going just to some storage facility if they exist at all. That is not how healthy demand looks like.

France is really serious about it. That is great for the entire EU. Even if most EU countries are still far too complacent, France is currently creating alternatives, doing the hard work, so that alternatives and real world expertise will exist in a few years, when the rest suddenly figures out that the roof is burning.

I don’t claim I know when the correction will happen but I wonder what massive alternative demand you see for the mountains of highly specialised server gpus in storage that will be obsolete in maybe 3 years time? For many of them that means likely before they will ever be turned on. The dotcom bubble created infrastructure that was, largely, not obsolete when the bubble bursted and made a lot of sense to salvage. That is a fundamental difference to inference infrastructure.

It is almost as if Iran had written the vaccination guidelines for the US air force.

If you want to be better than that, look for cars with LFP battery. They tend to be used in the less expensive cars and in lower capacity configurations. Their carbon footprint is roughly half of the regular NMC batteries and the only mined metal they need is iron and no zink, mangan or cobalt are needed in their chemistry.

That and try to use renewable energy, eg with home owned photovoltaic. If you do all of that, the break even is way before even 2 years and life cycle CO2 footprint is only a fraction of an ICE vehicle.

Isn’t it a bit late for St. Patrick’s Day?

Pretty insane how well that disinformation works. If you are worried about nickel, mangan and cobalt, just get a car with an LFP battery, which doesn’t need those heavy metals (it is based on lithium and iron phosphate). The only other critical resource in appreciable amounts is neodynium for permanent magnets. We are talking about 1-3 kg per car.

If you think that makes EVs worse for climate or environment than ICE vehicles, think again.

Full price at 0 EUR shipment on 1EUR order? By which magic can that cover shipment across the world, no matter how it is done?

Wrong. The micro orders via Ali Express standard shipping to Austria are distributed on their last leg by the Austrian Post, the same company sending any other letter.

Yet shipping can cost as little as nothing, on a 1 EUR order. You still maintain this is not dumping and instead cost covering?

I am talking about Austria because to compare it with other parliamentary democracies it helps to chose one concrete example, you can chose another one if you like. How about Germany, the largest member state. There Parliament’s position in this regard is actually weaker than in Austria.

I have no idea where you are coming from but you seem to lack knowledge how parliamentary democracies work if you hold the completely outlandish view that they are on the same level as the Chinese system in terms of democracy.

Back to the EU Commission. Its election is obviously a system where both, the Council / member states and the EP hold power. (“election” is the word in the treaties btw) This is by design. Power is not centralised. It is common in parliamentary democracies that parliaments elect/consent on members of the government but don’t choose them. However government with members that are not to the liking of a majority in Parliament won’t be elected/voted into power. The same is the case in the EU and there is precedent for that as well. The vote on VdL yielded a paper thin majority im the EP and only because VdL was giving the EP concessions in return. If the EP targets candidates as not acceptable they will not make it into the Commission. Again, there is precedent for that.

If that sounds like Chinese “democracy” to you, half the democracies (ie all parliamentary democracies) on earth are in reality a Chinese style “democracy”. Seriously?

Mistral has recently shown a good trajectory of improvement. It is already an important thing that there is a European mid range open weight model that can compete. (Frontier models need a lot more resources, it is important to compare apples with apples) This is good enough for many applications were data security and sovereignity are prime concerns. Of course, it would be good to have a frontier model, lets see how Large 4 will perform when we get there.

The EU commission is elected by the directly elected European Parliament based on suggestions by the Council/member states. The Commission can be voted out of office anytime when it loses support in the European Parliament.

The Austrian government is elected by Parliament based on suggestions by the Chancelor candidate (the latter chosen by the President). The parliament can vote the government out of office anytime.

According to you the one thing is utterly undemocratic while the other is not. ok.

The EU Commission is not the EU, but it is its executive and administration. I f you just kill that, you let everthing derail. Bureaucracy is a dirty word but there without it political entities implode.

Mistral Medium 3.5 isn’t that far behind comparable current open weight models.

Who knows? That is either just an excuse to protect that illegal facility of an oligarch or they are really using that facility to target girl schools in Iran.