A year or so ago, I was able to seriously score an awesome video card for my MSFS system.
What (apparently) happened was that some poor sod had spent huge bucks on a whole s-load of high-end video cards for crypto-currency mining.
The very next day, (or something like that), they changed the crypto-currency algorithms to make them not require massive racks of video cards to crypto-mine, rendering his huge investment in high-end video cards virtually worthless!
Result:
I snagged an awesome video card for pennies on the dollar that had never been taken out of the box!
P.S.
While shopping for upgrades for the granddaughter’s computers at Micro Center, I saw a “video card” - that weighed in at more than $2000!! Each.
And!
Liquid cooling solutions for cooling the beastie as you try for petaflop performance.
First:
Where do you put them, or is that a gigantic robot?
Second:
Are they outta their flippin’ minds? This is obviously not intended for mere mortals like us, but rather research facilities with bottomless budgets.
Obviously they don’t have Raspberry Pi based robots in their sights.
The demo had a MayFly AI wireless video camera / distance sensor mounted on a $400 Create3 sending the video direct via WiFi to a desktop with the two RTX4090 cards.
So, it wasn’t the robot that had the video cards, but the huge supercomputer they had it connected to, 'eh?
IMHO, that’s cheating. You could make a micro:bit swim the Hellespont if it had a big enough co-processor.
Again IMHO, the “robot” wasn’t the mobile appendage, but the huge honkin’ monster it was connected to. Just go ahead and put wheels on it and be done with it all.
The definition of “robot” seems both vague and fluid. Since I am mostly interested in autonomous behavior and I don’t care much about how I get there, I am personally ok leaving “self-contained” out of my robot definition. This makes wireless (or even wired) co-processors ok, even very expensive ones that I can’t afford!
