Reiner Pope: belief

Transcript context

…Elon is excited about data centers in space. The two criticisms I've heard are that cooling is very hard and then repairing the chips is hard. But I know nothing about chips. You do. The repair is really interesting. When you look at how NVIDIA deploys their racks, how we do something pretty similar to what NVIDIA does. In general, you always need to design for the fact that some of your chips are going to be down. Mean time between failure of chips is not that large. In a cluster of 100,000 chips, there are going to be chips that are down all the time. One way you can do that is you can make a rack where one rack has spare chips in it. NVIDIA has eight spare chips in a rack of 64. That's pretty good. The combinatorics works really well for you there. Because you can pick which ones to avoid, you can with very high probability tolerate a lot of failures. And then the other just for the other family of things is to say my rack has to work, but I have some spare racks as well. You can math that out with the tax of reliability here is only like 10%, that's pretty good. But that relies on someone coming and servicing the part within a day or something like that. If you say they're going to service it never, then I think you actually can get where you want to be, but maybe with 100% tax on reliability rather than 10%. For example, if you think the average lifetime of a chip is in the range of three to five years. That means if I deploy twice as many chips, then three to five years from now, half of them will still work. Also, the burn-in is particularly failure-y. How about the cooling?…

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