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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'

#191
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then buy two and stack them! Also I'm unfamiliar with macs is there really a MacBook pro with 256GB of RAM?

No, macbooks pro cap at 128GB. But, still, they are a laptop. It'll be interesting to see if Apple can offer a good counter for the desktop. The mac pro can go to 192Gb which is closer to the 128Gb Digits + your Desktop machine. At $9299 price tag, it's not too competitive but close.

> It'll be interesting to see if Apple can offer a good counter for the desktop.

Mac Pro [0] is a desktop with M2 Ultra and up to 192GB of unified memory.

[0] https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

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

#192
There's a market not described here: bioinformatics.

The owner of the market, Illumina, already ships their own bespoke hardware chips in servers called DRAGEN for faster analysis of thousands of genomes. Their main market for this product is in personalised medicine, as genome sequencing in humans is becoming common.

Other companies like Oxford Nanopore use on-board GPUs to call bases (i.e., from raw electric signal coming off the sequencer to A, T, G, C) but it's not working as well as it could due to size and power constraints. I feel like this could be a huge game changer for someone like ONT, especially with cooler stuff like adaptive sequencing.

Other avenues of bioinformatics, such as most day-to-day analysis software, is still very CPU and RAM heavy.

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

#193
If they end up actually shipping this, lots of people will buy these machines to get an AArch64 Linux workstation—even if they are not interested in AI or Nvidia GPUs.

At $3,000, it will be considerably cheaper than alternatives available today (except for SoC boards with extremely poor performance, obviously). I also expect that Nvidia will use its existing distribution channels for this, giving consumers a shot at buying the hardware (without first creating a company and losing consumer protections along the way).

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

#194
post #6

I feel this is bigger than the 5x series GPUs. Given the craze around AI/LLMs, this can also potentially eat into Apple’s slice of the enthusiast AI dev segment once the M4 Max/Ultra Mac minis are released. I sure wished I held some Nvidia stocks, they seem to be doing everything right in the last few years!

Jensen did say in recent interview, paraphrasing, “they are trying to kill my company”.

Those Macs with unified memory is a threat he is immediately addressing. Jensen is a wartime ceo from the looks of it, he’s not joking.

No wonder AMD is staying out of the high end space, since NVIDIA is going head on with Apple (and AMD is not in the business of competing with Apple).

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

#195
post #155
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's annoying I do LLMs for work and have a bit of an interest in them and doing stuff with GANS etc. I have a bit of an interest in games too. If I could get one platform for both, I could justify 2k maybe a bit more. I can't justify that for just one half: running games on Mac, right now via Linux: no thanks. And on the PC side, nvidia consumer cards only go to 24gb which is a bit limiting for LLMs, while being ver…

[deleted]

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

#196

There's a market not described here: bioinformatics. The owner of the market, Illumina, already ships their own bespoke hardware chips in servers called DRAGEN for faster analysis of thousands of genomes. Their main market for this product is in personalised medicine, as genome sequencing in humans is becoming common. Other companies like Oxford Nanopore use on-board GPUs to call bases (i.e., from raw electric signal…

Is this for research labs, health clinics, or peoples homes?

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

#197

I'm a bit surprised by the amount of comments comparing the cost to (often cheap) cloud solutions. Nvidia's value proposition is completely different in my opinion. Say I have a startup in the EU that handles personal data or some company secrets and wants to use an LLM to analyse it (like using RAG). Having that data never leave your basement sure can be worth more than $3000 if performance is not a bottleneck.

Even for established companies this is great. A tech company can have a few of these locally hosted and users can poll the company LLM with sensitive data.

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

#198
post #6

I feel this is bigger than the 5x series GPUs. Given the craze around AI/LLMs, this can also potentially eat into Apple’s slice of the enthusiast AI dev segment once the M4 Max/Ultra Mac minis are released. I sure wished I held some Nvidia stocks, they seem to be doing everything right in the last few years!

Jensen did say in recent interview, paraphrasing, “they are trying to kill my company”. Those Macs with unified memory is a threat he is immediately addressing. Jensen is a wartime ceo from the looks of it, he’s not joking. No wonder AMD is staying out of the high end space, since NVIDIA is going head on with Apple (and AMD is not in the business of competing with Apple).

You missed the Ryzen hx ai pro 395 product announcement

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot more gamers than people wanting to play with LLms at home.

There's a titanic market with people wanting some uncensored local LLM/image/video generation model. This market extremely overlaps with gamers today, but will grow exponentially every year.

>There's a titantic market

How so?

Only 40% of gamers use a PC, a portion of those use AI in any meaningful way, and a fraction of those want to set up a local AI instance.

Then someone releases an uncensored, cloud based AI and takes your market?

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

#200
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

today’s enthusiast, grad student, hacker is tomorrow’s startup founder, CEO, CTO or 10x contributor in large tech company

> tomorrow’s startup founder, CEO, CTO or 10x contributor in large tech company Do we need more of those? We need plumbers and people that know how to build houses. We are completely full on founders and executives.

We might not, but Nvidia would certainly like it.
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