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Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

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Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#41

Post by VikingCoder »

dagmx wrote: post #20
VikingCoder wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were NVidia, I would be throwing everything I could at making entertainment experiences that need one of these to run... I mean, this is awfully close to being "Her" in a box, right?

I feel like a lot of people miss that Her was a dystopian future, not an ideal to hit. Also, it’s $3000. For that you could buy subscriptions to OpenAI etc and have the dystopian partner everywhere you go.

We already live in dystopian hell and I'd like to have Scarlett Johansen whispering in my ear, thanks.

Also, I don't particularly want my data to be processed by anyone else.

Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#42

Post by sliken »

modeless wrote: post #5

Finally a real ARM workstation from Nvidia! This will be much faster than Apple's offerings for AI work. And at $3000 it is much cheaper than any Mac with 128 GB RAM.

On the CPU size the Neoverse N2 doesn't compete particularly well with apple's M4, or the Zen5 for the matter.

Bit bit hard to tell what's on offer on the GPU side, I wouldn't be surprised if it was RTX 4070 to 5070 in that range.

If the price/perf is high enough $3k wouldn't be a bad deal, I suspect a Strix Halo (better CPU cores, 256GB/sec memory interface, likely slower GPU cores) will be better price/perf, same max ram for unified memory, and cheaper.

Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#43

Post by SteveNuts »

stonogo wrote: post #37
narrator wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here he says that in order for the cloud and the PC to be compatible, he's going to only support WSL2, the Windows subsystem for Linux which is a Linux API on top of Windows. Here's a link to the part of the keynote where he says this: https://youtu.be/MC7L_EWylb0?t=7259

"Linux API on top of Windows" is an interesting way to describe a virtual machine.

WSL2 is no longer a VM, afaik.

Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#44

Post by dagmx »

Karupan wrote: post #29
dagmx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the enthusiast side of things is a negligible part of the market. That said, enthusiasts do help drive a lot of the improvements to the tech stack so if they start using this, it’ll entrench NVIDIA even more.

I’m not so sure it’s negligible. My anecdotal experience is that since Apple Silicon chips were found to be “ok” enough to run inference with MLX, more non-technical people in my circle have asked me how they can run LLMs on their macs. Surely a smaller market than gamers or datacenters for sure.

I mean negligible to their bottom line. There may be tons of units bought or not, but the margin on a single datacenter system would buy tens of these.

It’s purely an ecosystem play imho. It benefits the kind of people who will go on to make potentially cool things and will stay loyal.

Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#45

Post by croes »

dagmx wrote: post #20
VikingCoder wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were NVidia, I would be throwing everything I could at making entertainment experiences that need one of these to run... I mean, this is awfully close to being "Her" in a box, right?

I feel like a lot of people miss that Her was a dystopian future, not an ideal to hit. Also, it’s $3000. For that you could buy subscriptions to OpenAI etc and have the dystopian partner everywhere you go.

OpenAI doesn’t make any profit. So either it dies or prices go up. Not to mention the privacy aspect of your own machine and the freedom of choice which models to run

Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#46

Post by sliken »

computably wrote: post #8
magicalhippo wrote: post #2

Not much was unveiled but it showed a Blackwell GPU with 1PFLOP of FP4 compute, 128GB unified DDR5X memory, 20 ARM cores, and ConnectX powering two QSFP slots so one can stack multiple of them. edit: While the title says "personal", Jensen did say this was aimed at startups and similar, so not your living room necessarily.

From the size and pricing ($3000) alone, it's safe to conclude it has less raw FLOPs than a 5090. Since it uses LPDDR5X, almost certainly less memory bandwidth too (5090 @ 1.8 TB/s, M4 Max w/ 128GB LPDDR5X @ 546 GB/s). Basically the only advantage is how much VRAM it packs in a small form factor, and presumably greater power efficiency at its smaller scale. The only thing it really competes with is the Mac Studio for…

I believe $3,000 is for the unmentioned minimum config, no idea on the mentioned 4TB storage and 128GB ram version.

Running a 96GB ram model isn't cheap (often with unified memory 25% is reserved for CPUs), so maybe it will win there.

Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#47

Post by lithiumii »

gigel82 wrote: post #11

What we need is more diversity in the space. Something between the Jetson and this thing, at under $1000 that can run in a LAN to do LLM, STT, TTS, etc. would be an awesome (if niche) device to enable truly local / private AI scenarios for privacy-sensitive folks.

[dead]

Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#48

Post by pulse7 »

stonogo wrote: post #37
narrator wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here he says that in order for the cloud and the PC to be compatible, he's going to only support WSL2, the Windows subsystem for Linux which is a Linux API on top of Windows. Here's a link to the part of the keynote where he says this: https://youtu.be/MC7L_EWylb0?t=7259

"Linux API on top of Windows" is an interesting way to describe a virtual machine.

WSL1 was "Linux API on top of Windows", WSL2 is "Linux VM on top of Windows"

Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#49

Post by sliken »

anigbrowl wrote: post #35

Honestly surprised at how affordable this is, I was expecting $5-6k as I scanned the opening paragraphs.

Might well be, from what I can tell the price "starts at $3k", which might well be config'd like the minimum mac studio for RAM and storage. Mac studios easily hit $5k-$6k or more.

Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#50

Post by z4y5f3 »

sliken wrote: post #36
narrator wrote: post #10

Nvidia releases a Linux desktop supercomputer that's better price/performance wise than anything Wintel is doing and their whole new software stack will only run on WSL2. They aren't porting to Win32. Wow, it may actually be the year of Linux on the Desktop.

Not sure how to judge better price/perf. I wouldn't expect 20 Neoverse N2 cores to do particularly well vs 16 zen5 cores. The GPU side looks promising, but they aren't mentioning memory bandwidth, configuration, spec, or performance. Did see vague claims of "starting at $3k", max 4TB nvme, and max 128GB ram. I'd expect AMD Strix Halo (AI Max plus 395) to be reasonably competitive.

NVIDIA is likely citing 1 PFlops at FP 4 sparse (they did this for GB200), so that is 128 TFlops BF16 dense, or 2/3 of what RTX 4090 is capable of. I would put the memory bandwidth at 546 GBps, using the same 512 bit LPDDR5X 8533 Mbps as Apple M4 max.
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