Useless is a strong term. I do a fair amount of research on a single 4090. Lots of problems can fit in <32 GB of VRAM. Even my 3060 is good enough to run small scale tests locally.
I’m in CV, and even with enterprise grade hardware, most folks I know are limited to 48GB (A40 and L40S, substantially cheaper and more accessible than A100/H100/H200). My advisor would always say that you should really try to set up a problem where you can iterate in a few days worth of time on a single GPU, and lots of problems are still approachable that way. Of course you’re not going to make the next SOTA VLM on a 5090, but not every problem is that big.
If your workload/test fits in 24GB, that’s already a “solved” problem. If it fits in 48GB, it’s possibly solved with your institution’s workstation or whatever.
But if it takes 80GB, as many projects seem to require these days since the A100 is such a common baseline, you are likely using very expensive cloud GPU time. I really love the idea of being able to tinker with a “full” 80GB+ workload (even having to deal with ROCM) without having to pay per hour.
Exactly, 32 is plenty to develop on, and why would you need to upgrade ram? It was years ago I did that in any computer let alone a tensor workstation. I feel like they made pretty good choices for what it’s for
Useless is a strong term. I do a fair amount of research on a single 4090. Lots of problems can fit in <32 GB of VRAM. Even my 3060 is good enough to run small scale tests locally.
I’m in CV, and even with enterprise grade hardware, most folks I know are limited to 48GB (A40 and L40S, substantially cheaper and more accessible than A100/H100/H200). My advisor would always say that you should really try to set up a problem where you can iterate in a few days worth of time on a single GPU, and lots of problems are still approachable that way. Of course you’re not going to make the next SOTA VLM on a 5090, but not every problem is that big.
Fair. True.
If your workload/test fits in 24GB, that’s already a “solved” problem. If it fits in 48GB, it’s possibly solved with your institution’s workstation or whatever.
But if it takes 80GB, as many projects seem to require these days since the A100 is such a common baseline, you are likely using very expensive cloud GPU time. I really love the idea of being able to tinker with a “full” 80GB+ workload (even having to deal with ROCM) without having to pay per hour.
Exactly, 32 is plenty to develop on, and why would you need to upgrade ram? It was years ago I did that in any computer let alone a tensor workstation. I feel like they made pretty good choices for what it’s for