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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'

#251

Post by JohnBooty »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #180
anonylizard wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 titanic market with people wanting some uncensored local LLM/image/video generation model. No. There's already too much porn on the internet, and AI porn is cringe and will get old very fast.

I think there are a lot of non-porn uses. I see a lot of YouTube thumbnails that seem AI generated, but feature copyrighted stuff.

(example: a thumbnail for a YT video about a video game, featuring AI-generated art based on that game. because copyright reasons, in my very limited experience Dall-E won't let you do that)

I agree that AI porn doesn't seem a real market driver. With 8 billion people on Earth I know it has its fans I guess, but people barely pay for porn in the first place so I reallllly dunno how many people are paying for AI porn either directly or indirectly.

It's unclear to me if AI generated video will ever really cross the "uncanny valley." Of course, people betting against AI have lost those bets again and again but I don't know.

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

#252

Post by WaxProlix »

stuaxo wrote: post #155
Karupan wrote: 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…

The new $2k card from Nvidia will be 32GB but your point stands. AMD is planning a unified chiplet based GPU architecture (AI/data center/workstation/gaming) called UDNA, which might alleviate some of these issues. It's been delayed and delayed though - hence the lackluster GPU offerings from team Red this cycle - so I haven't been getting my hopes up.

Maybe (LP)CAMM2 memory will make model usage just cheap enough that I can have a hosting server for it and do my usual midrange gaming GPU thing before then.

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

#253

Post by logicchains »

timmg wrote: post #247

One thing I didn't see mentioned: this would be a good motivation for Nvidia to release "open weights" models. Just like Mac OS is free when you buy a Mac, having the latest high-quality LLM for free that just happens to run well on this box is a very interesting value-prop. And Nvidia definitely has the compute to make it happen.

They did exactly this, announcing at the same event new Nemo models upcoming (a fine-tune of llama).

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

#254

Post by diggan »

gavi wrote: post #243

this image seems to be AI Generated - :-) https://s3.amazonaws.com/cms.ipressroom.com/219/files/20250/... Source: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-puts-grace-blackwe...

Agree, unless I've missed some recent invention where keyboards now have two of either Enter/Backspace/Shift keys on the right side.

Not sure if that isn't expected though? Likely most people wouldn't even notice, and the company can say they're dogfooding some product I guess.

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

#255

Post by mycall »

pjmlp wrote: post #166
pulse7 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

More like, WSL1 was "Linux API on top of NT kernel picoprocesses", WSL2 is "Linux VM on top of Hyper-V"

I wish WSL1 was open sourced

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

#256

Post by ckemere »

mrlongroots wrote: post #187
dagmx wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. It will be massive for research labs. Most academics have to jump through a lot of hoops to get to play with not just CUDA, but also GPUDirect/RDMA/Infiniband etc. If you get older/donated hardware, you may have a large cluster but not newer features.

Academic minimal-bureaucracy purchasing card limit is about $4k, so pricing is convenient*2.

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

#257

Post by diggan »

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.

> their whole new software stack will only run on WSL2. They aren't porting to Win32

Wait, what do you mean exactly? Isn't WSL2 just a VM essentially? Don't you mean it'll run on Linux (which you also can run on WSL2)?

Or will it really only work with WSL2? I was excited as I thought it was just a Linux Workstation, but if WSL2 gets involved/is required somehow, then I need to run the other direction.

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

#258

Post by adrian_b »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #135
computably wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Of course. It has much less FLOPs than the 5090, after all this will have a TDP of ~50W and run off a regular USB-PD power supply. It's basically the successor to the AGX Orin and in line with its pricing (considering it comes with a fast NIC). The AGX Orin had RTX 3050 levels of performance.

The successor of NVIDIA Orin is named Thor and it is expected to be launched later this year.

It uses other Arm processor cores than Digits, i.e. Neoverse V3AE, the automotive-enhanced version of Neoverse V3 (which is the server core version of Cortex-X4). According to rumors, NVIDIA Thor might have 14 Neoverse V3AE cores in the base version and there is also a double-die version.

The GPU of NVIDIA Thor is also a Blackwell, but probably with a very different configuration than in NVIDIA Digits.

NVIDIA Thor, like Orin, is intended for high reliability applications, like in automotive or industrial environments, unlike NVIDIA Digits, which is made with consumer-level technology.

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

#259

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

sheepscreek wrote: post #214
Karupan wrote: 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!

The developers they are referring to aren’t just enthusiasts; they are also developers who were purchasing SuperMicro and Lambda PCs to develop models for their employers. Many enterprises will buy these for local development because it frees up the highly expensive enterprise-level chip for commercial use. This is a genius move. I am more baffled by the insane form factor that can pack this much power inside a Mac M…

The 1 PetaFLOP spec and 200GB model capacity specs are for FP4 (4-bit floating point), which means inference not training/development. It's still be a decent personal development machine, but not for that size of model.
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