Yeah, that came off clumsily (I’d lost part of my comment while switching tabs on my phone).

An AMD Rome/Milan part will give you 256 decent threads on a 2S box with a ton of RAM for say $20-25k at list price (e.g., a Dell power edge without any of their premium support or lots of flash). By comparison, the list price of just an A100 is $15k (and you still need a server to drive the thing).

So for shops shoving these into a data center they still need to do a cost/benefit tradeoff of “how much faster is this for our shows, can anyone else make use of it, how much power do these draw...”. If anything, the note about more and more software using CUDA is probably as important as “ray tracing is now sufficiently faster” since the lack of reuse has held them back (similar things for video encoding historically: if you’ve got a lot of cpus around, it was historically hard to beat for $/transcode).

The reason I asked is I did a performance trade-off with a v100 and dual epyc rome with 64 cores, and the v100 won handily for my tasks. That obviously won't always be the case, but in terms of threads you're now comparing 256 to 5000+, but obviously not apples to apples.

Is the high priced 256 thread part that interesting for rendering? You can get 4 of the 64 thread parts on separate boards and each one will have its own 8 channel ddr instead of having to share that bandwidth. Total performance will be higher for less or same money. Power budget will be higher but only a couple dollars a day, at most. But I haven't been involved in a cluster for some time, so not really sure what is done these days.