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#more#models#data#cerebras#nvidia#price#gpus#why#inference#per

Discussion (82 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

denizay1 minute ago
The comparison seems incomplete. CS‑4 is a full rack-scale system with three wafer-scale processors, but the exact GPU models, GPU count, power consumption, price information are not disclosed. We still don't know if buying a multi-GPU rack (or racks) is cheaper and/or more efficient in power. The fact that they didn't disclose these numbers makes me believe that the numbers are not in their favor. And personally, makes me see them as disingenuous.
avantnyc4 minutes ago
Cerebras should slowly also move to dgx/ryzen market for a desktop version for masses at affordable price yet providing substantial tokens/second on desktop
syntaxingabout 2 hours ago
I think the fun takeaway from this is that GPT 5.4 is probably 45B active parameters and GPT 5.6 Sol is closer to 50B.
logicalleeabout 2 hours ago
(Where did you see that?)

This was also interesting: "CS-4 delivers more than 1,000 tokens per second on models exceeding 10 trillion parameters." Was it known that there were 10 trillion parameter models in use?

I think the frontier providers keep the size of their models carefully hidden.

ewildabout 2 hours ago
It's rumored fable is around that 10T number
walrus01about 2 hours ago
If this is true, it's even more impressive that some of the open weight models that are <3.5T in size, approx 33% of its size, are within a few points of it in the artificial analysis leaderboard.
sreekanth850about 2 hours ago
AMD along with cerebras may probably compete with NVIDIA monopoly in near future. Also, NVIDIA will have competition form multiple companies. Just my prediction.
eitally28 minutes ago
Maybe, but GPU is just one aspect of NVIDIA's dominance. If you are buying Vera Rubin GPUs, you're getting an NVL72 rack, which is only one of several racks that you're probably buying. You'll also need your NVIDIA racks with NVIDIA networking & storage gear, too. At the end of the day, they're "vertically integrated" for your accelerated computing data center (e.g. the "AI Factory"). This doesn't even count the software layer, where CUDA + CUDA-X (not to mention the software for all the sysadmin pieces) has a huge first mover advantage over anyone else.
reilly3000about 2 hours ago
> CS-4 delivers more than 1,000 tokens per second on models exceeding 10 trillion parameters

Oops did they just out GPT-5.6 sol’s parameter count?

shoabout 2 hours ago
Sol is supposed to be 5T according to rumour. The imminent Astra is allegedly 10
nozzlegear42 minutes ago
Rumors and allegations aren't worth much. Why don't they just tell us mere mortals?
whatever1about 2 hours ago
I mean we kinda know the frontier models are multi trillion parameter models. The only open weights that are close to the frontier are that size too
aneryuabout 1 hour ago
It would be even better if a version available to individual users were released soon.
gpmabout 1 hour ago
They do offer API services to individual users... though with a set of models that makes it unlikely that you want to use it. They are promising Qwen 3.8 27B any day now though*.

if you have the money as an "individual user" to purchase one of their racks... save your money and retire.

* Actually they sent out an email claiming they already have it, but I don't seem to have access, they're promising to release it to the "shared tier" any day now.

fragmedeabout 1 hour ago
> save your money and retire.

Now that this hypothetical person has retired, what are they gonna do all day? Just sit on the beach and drink Mai Tais? If that's what they wanna do, sure, but nerds gonna nerd, and if I had that kind of money to retire on, I'd totally buy some ridiculously expensive AI box for fun.

gpmabout 1 hour ago
Ah but if you have the kind of money where this is a reasonable retirement hobby purchase, you aren't bothered by representing yourself as a "enterprise" :P
ttulabout 1 hour ago
I’ll get that 250kW home power service dropped in next week!
z2about 1 hour ago
For now you can rig an adapter to your nearest DC EV charging station, but make sure it's near a body of water for the cooling.
kobe_bryant10 minutes ago
can these vibe coded sites please set a max width and overflow so their sites work fine on mobile
anonymous_user9about 2 hours ago
Conspicuously missing: power consumption figures
wmfabout 2 hours ago
162 kW
walrus01about 2 hours ago
I guess we know why there's a fair bit of investment money going into small modular nuclear reactor startups now.
fragmedeabout 1 hour ago
And advanced geothermal. Fervo Energy let's us get energy that's not based on burning fossil fuels but is, instead, able to produce energy from the ground.
roughlyabout 2 hours ago
God, I was going to ask if this could be deployed in a standard existing datacenter, but I guess that answers that question.
xatttabout 2 hours ago
I presume per rack?

Can you imagine something radiating that much energy into a space in your home?

walrus01about 2 hours ago
It's mandatory liquid cooling, so it's meant to be attached to a specialized liquid cooling loop that gets the heat outside the building.

This is far beyond the practical maximums of like 10 to 15kW per 44U cabinet front to rear air cooling for 'regular' rackmount server stuff.

wmfabout 2 hours ago
I guess because I have actually set foot in a data center I don't imagine literally every product in my home.
logicalleeabout 2 hours ago
"10x more throughput per watt than CS-3"
ethanzhang1024about 2 hours ago
If cerebars is performing well, why didn't its predecessor, server S-3, become the largest API token provider on OpenRouter, surpassing the official model releases?
walrus01about 2 hours ago
Without having any inside information, one possible theory:

All or a vast majority of of the cerebras manufacturing capacity was going to a few companies that aren't publicly available inference providers on openrouter, for their own internal use.

or

The asking price of the S-3, no matter how speedy it might be, for small/medium size customers made it economically prohibitive to purchase and use to sell public inference vs. buying more common nvidia b200 or whatever.

smallerizeabout 2 hours ago
If you're willing to pay a significant premium for latency, why use openrouter? And anyway Cerebras only supported a few specific models.
aseippabout 1 hour ago
The WSE is very expensive to build, and they have a waiting list of customers who are already willing to pay a lot of money for the available supply.
doctorpanglossabout 2 hours ago
it only takes ~445 GB300 NVL72 (about $22b) to run ALL of openrouter demand for a year. Microsoft rolled out $32b of DC 2026Q1.

imo the issue is that most openrouter demand is inauthentic activity (things that anthropic and openai models will refuse to do like pretend to not be bots when interacting with humans)

HDBaseT34 minutes ago
It is worth mentioning, the OpenRouter demand isn't static though. It has increased week on week since early 2026.
senordevnyc42 minutes ago
I was curious so I looked it up: looks like a GB300 NVL72 is about $4M. So $22B would buy you 5500 such racks, no?
9cb14c1ec0about 3 hours ago
Just a reminder for everyone that we are only several years and 3 or 4 iterations into hardware being optimized for LLMs. We should all expect orders of magnitude improvement in speed and/or cost over the next 5 years. Then we can have fun conversations about "unlimited" "intelligence" and about what the price wars and profit margins of consumer AI products are when your average ChatGPT user costs the company $0.10 per month.

> CS-4 delivers more than 1,000 tokens per second on models exceeding 10 trillion parameters

Wow!

SwellJoeabout 2 hours ago
And, the software side isn't finished being optimized, either. We've seen with Qwen 3.8 27B and DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 and GLM 5.3 that quite small models can pack a punch. Intelligence density will improve, efficiency of kernels will improve, efficiency of KV caching and MTP will improve, algorithms for splitting workloads across compute units will improve.

It'll all be as cheap as DeepSeek was before the price hike. And, it'll become more and more realistic to run near-frontier intelligence on personal devices.

moralestapiaabout 1 hour ago
Hence why taalas was one of the best strategic acquisitions of the year.

I'm honestly baffled they were not acquired by somebody else (sorry AMD).

rvzabout 2 hours ago
Congratulations! You have just realized that the AI data center build out is a total scam, built on both the insurmountable trillions of debt, and the assumption that only GPUs are all we need to continue scaling.

There exist other AI accelerators (TPUs, ASICs) that perfectly exceed the throughput that LLMs need to scale as well. But the true solution is more software optimizations. There's a tiny handful of them but more needs to be discovered so that we can reduce building hundreds of more data centers as the alternatives mature.

As better software becomes more useful for the alternative AI hardware for developers with LLMs running efficiently you then would have more choices of hardware to run your LLMs on rather than just only GPUs.

blovescoffeeabout 2 hours ago
TPUs and ASICs run in data centers too. Your argument only holds true if there's some satisfied limit to demand for inference. If not, data centers will continue to spring up to host more and more agents. Even if agents were running on hardware and software as efficient as the human brain, its conceivable we want trillions of them running at any given time which would require data center scale.
georgeecollinsabout 1 hour ago
Everything has some satisfied limit to demand, often depending on the price. If you assume there will never be any satisfied limit to demand for inference at any price you can justify any investment.
skyberrysabout 2 hours ago
I wonder what this looks like in 5 years... Will there be a massive push to repurpose these giant boxes into housing? Will they get turned back into the farm land from where they came? When a data center goes bust, what happens to the parts left behind?
gpmabout 2 hours ago
I'd think the infrastructure would tend towards factories, smelters, and so on. Industrial things that have reasonably high power demands, can use the building, and don't care about the lack of windows.

They're typically not built where you want housing, and the buildings are distinctly the wrong shape.

If you can't use the power infrastructure profitably my next thought would be warehousing.

But also... we've seen a pretty continually increasing demand for compute. Even if AI busts a bit (or becomes a bit more efficient) I bet most data centres stay data centres, just less profitable ones.

jryle70about 1 hour ago
Huh, why I'm not surprised that HN is full of opinions confidently stated without any numbers or resources to back up?

> built on both the insurmountable trillions of debt, and the assumption that only GPUs are all we need to continue scaling.

Insurmountable according to whom? And who assume that only GPUs are all we need to continue scaling? Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI, all have or plan custom non-GPU AI chips. Do they plan to use them not for scaling?

apiabout 2 hours ago
This is part of why I think the data center build-out is a bubble. We've barely scratched the surface when it comes to hardware optimization. We'll see exponential improvements in energy efficiency and speed over the next decade. Exponential, not linear.

GPUs really aren't that great for AI. They just happen to be the best chips we have in mass production right now for this work load, and it takes time to field new designs. Basically every chip engineer on the planet is working on this right now.

RachelFabout 1 hour ago
True, I have to agree with you. The AI giants might be investing a huge amount of money in generation 1 technology. There might be a much better way to do it just around the corner. They might know this and thus the hurry to IPO.

A rough analogy would be if the first generation of ISP's spent billions on dial-up exchanges, when fibre could be invented next year.

__turbobrew__33 minutes ago
By the time these gigawatt datacenters are done being built the hardware will be so far behind state of the art they may be mostly useless.
petraabout 1 hour ago
I wonder: in world where inference is cheap, how many engineering agents that use simulation as their feedback we will use?

In the scenario, engineering everything becomes so easy - so why not optimize everything? every component, every product, every system?

And maybe llm's could invent. So even more to simulate. And simulation is inherently compute-heavy.

So unless there are some other bottlenecks, we'll use a lot of simulation servers.

mindwokabout 2 hours ago
Whether it's a bubble or not depends on how much the demand for compute and the type of workload keeps growing, though.

If AI tends to be something used mainly in ideation and development, which is how a lot of people use it today, then once consumer hardware gets good enough you could see a bunch of the current data centre workloads move onto consumer devices.

But if AI starts being used more in repeatable, operational workloads I think it makes sense to have significant cloud infrastructure for it. TBH I haven't seen much of this, and I've been skeptical about people using agents for much of anything when it can be done with just software. But we are starting to see more of this kind of workload, like the taggable Claude in your slack etc that people seem to really love.

winridabout 2 hours ago
On the plus side, lots of cheap servers to swoop up :)
srousseyabout 2 hours ago
But power hungry.

In that 5+ year timeline, the compute per watt could change by three orders of magnitude.

GPUs are to LLMs what CPUs are to gaming — not a good fit.

4k0hzabout 2 hours ago
> Introducing the all new Cerebras CS-4, a revolutionary rack-scale solution that delivers upto 30x faster inference compared to GPUs, enhanced economics, and a simple path todeploy [sic] hyperscale capacity.

Did nobody proofread this?

algoth1about 2 hours ago
If they had ask Claude it would probably look like this: Introducing the all new Cerebras CS-4, a revolutionary rack-scale solution that delivers up to 30x faster inference compared to GPUs, enhanced economics, and a simple path to load-bearing hyper scale capacity.
jm4about 2 hours ago
That's unusually honest and the sharpest thing in this thread.
wren6991about 1 hour ago
You're underselling it, and here's why.
SoMomentaryabout 2 hours ago
Sometimes I wonder if mistakes are now used to indicate the possibility that a human actually wrote it.
ceejayozabout 2 hours ago
There’s been a spate of Reddit AI bots using all lower case in hopes of evading detection.

It’s still incredibly obvious.

VladVladikoff39 minutes ago
I don’t really visit Reddit much these days but would love to see an example.
geodelabout 2 hours ago
Maybe it is just part of their "compact design".
dpkirchnerabout 2 hours ago
An error no frontier LLM would make, eh
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lostmsuabout 2 hours ago
KV caching status?

What's the point of 1000tok/s if you have to do prefill on every agentic turn which at 100k depth would make it 1.5 min latency every turn?

walrus01about 2 hours ago
Information about RAM type/size and connection topology of the RAM to be used for context cache seems to be conspicuously absent from the slick looking marketing materials.
gpmabout 2 hours ago
There's a few more details at the bottom of this page: https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/introducing-cerebras-cs-4

44GB on-chip-sram * 3 chips. Per chip: 43.2 PB/s memory access + 53.5 PB/s on-chip fabric bandwidth + 2.4 Tbits/s "IO" bandwidth (I think that means their RoCE v2 RDMA over Ethernet interface).

I suspect there might be a certain amount of customization for how much RAM they attach when you order it.

sva_about 1 hour ago
> enabling massive clusters and models with more than 50 trillion parameters
OutOfHereabout 2 hours ago
Five years from now, I don't know why anyone will still be using Nvidia for inference. Note that Cerebras is for inference only, not for training.

I understand that Cerebras has competition, but this bodes even more poorly for Nvidia for inference. Nvidia may still have a role to play for training, however.

wmfabout 2 hours ago
Cerebras is only claiming ~2x the performance of Groqvidia which usually isn't enough for people to switch.
tamimioabout 2 hours ago
I wonder what are the benchmarks of hashcat on different hashes.
gpmabout 2 hours ago
Is it just me or is it bizarre that they're advertising old open-weight models.

GLM 4.7 (December 2025) not 5 (Feb) 5.1 (April) or 5.2 (June). 5.3 (4 days ago) is, to be fair, not open weights yet... but there's a lot since 4.7.

Kimi K2.7 (April) not K2.7-code (June) or K3 (July).

Gemma 4 (April), Llama (April), and gpt-oss (August 2025) are up to date, but old (for models).

Meanwhile the closed source GPT 5.6 sol is up to date (June)...

Should potential purchasers take away from this that they're not going to be able to run recent models unless they front the cost of developing software or something?

eliabout 2 hours ago
I think they run whatever models they get paid to run. But mostly from enterprise. They are clearly not interested in consumer dollars.
gpmabout 2 hours ago
I mean the product is a server rack and while there's no advertised price I would assume it's six figures. So yes, an enterprise product.

But even an enterprise is going to care about the difference between "we can run the model we want with support from the manufacturer" and "we have to purchase the product, and then spend another 6 figure sum having developers port a recent model to the product to use it".

kube-systemabout 1 hour ago
You’re at least an order or magnitude under… likely two.

A single AI server with a mere 8 GPUs from Nvidia is already mid 6 digits. A rack system from Nvidia is mid 7 digits.

There’s some info out there that suggests the CS1 had an 8 digits price tag, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see that here.

WarmWashabout 2 hours ago
I feel like 6-figures would be the clearance price on it...