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Hardware

A cheap but effective computer

·1400 words·7 mins
Like every computer scientist or enthusiast, over the years I’ve piled up an impressive number of components: CPUs, memory, disks, cases, power supplies and boards of every kind. Anything more than 10 years old is considered obsolete, and yet these components are still perfectly functional and can run almost anything decently. Does that apply to AI models too? Definitely not! But there is a loophole: what matters is the GPU, because the LLM runs entirely there. The rest of the machine doesn’t need to be particularly sophisticated.