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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'

#271

Post by mycall »

noduerme wrote: post #124
mrtksn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a real thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_hermit In the past, in Europe, some wealthy people used to look after of a scholar living on their premises so they can ask them questions etc.

aha, this is really something. I just got around to watching "Furiosa" last night. So something like having a personal "history man" (although, my take on the whole Mad Max series is that it's just bottled up fear-porn about white settlers going uncivilized and becoming "tribal" - a colonial horror tale, "The Heart of Darkness" with motorcycles - common anywhere a relatively small group spread themselves out on a lot…

> We really are entering a new dark age.

All the indicators are there:

Instead of leaders like Charlemagne who unified the Frankish domain, stabilized society, and promoted education and culture, we now have leaders who want to dismantle society, education and use culture for wars.

Long-distance ocean trade routes since the 1950s have taken international commerce to another level for humans, but this is being challenged now by aging/leaking tankers, unruly piracy at transit choke points, communication cable destruction, etc.

Loss of interest in classical learning and the arts where dystopian, murder or horror movies, music and books now are the best sellers as WW3 seems to be on many people's minds now.

While innovations are still occurring for improved navigation and agricultural productivity, the Earth's ecosystem collapse is in full effect.

I wish it could reversed somehow.

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

#272

Post by 627467 »

derbaum wrote: post #140

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.

> Having that data never leave your basement sure can be worth more than $3000 if performance is not a bottleneck

I get what you're saying, but there are also regulations (and your own business interest) that expects data redundancy/protection which keeping everything on-site doesnt seem to cover

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

#273

Post by adrian_b »

kllrnohj wrote: post #203
fweimer wrote: post #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…

> At $3,000, it will be considerably cheaper than alternatives available today $3000 gets me a 64-core Altra Q64-22 from a major-enough SI today: https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1-n1/configure And of course if you don't care about the SI part, then you can just buy that motherboard & CPU directly for $1400 https://www.newegg.com/asrock-rack-altrad8ud-1l2t-q64-22-amp... with the 128-core variant being $240…

That Altra may be a good choice for certain server applications, like a Web server, but when used as a workstation it will be sluggish, because it uses weak cores, with much lower single-threaded performance than the Arm cores used in NVIDIA Digits.

For certain applications, e.g. for those with many array operations, the 20 cores of Digits might match 40 cores of Altra at equal clock frequency, but the cores of Digits are likely to also have a higher clock frequency, so for some applications the 20 Arm cores of Digits may provide a higher throughput than 64 Altra cores, while also having a much higher single-thread performance, perhaps about double.

So at equal price, NVIDIA Digits is certainly preferable as a workstation instead of a 64-core Altra. As a server, the latter should be better.

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

#274

Post by cess11 »

With a bit of luck it'll mean some of the Jetson series will get cheaper.

While I'm quite the "AI" sceptic I think it might be interesting to have a node in my home network capable of a bit of this and that in this area, some text-to-speech, speech-to-text, object identification, which to be decent needs a bit more than the usual IoT- and ESP-chips can manage.

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

#275

Post by T-A »

bloomingkales wrote: post #194
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!

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).

From https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amds-beastly...

The fire-breathing 120W Zen 5-powered flagship Ryzen AI Max+ 395 comes packing 16 CPU cores and 32 threads paired with 40 RDNA 3.5 (Radeon 8060S) integrated graphics cores (CUs), but perhaps more importantly, it supports up to 128GB of memory that is shared among the CPU, GPU, and XDNA 2 NPU AI engines. The memory can also be carved up to a distinct pool dedicated to the GPU only, thus delivering an astounding 256 GB/s of memory throughput that unlocks incredible performance in memory capacity-constrained AI workloads (details below). AMD says this delivers groundbreaking capabilities for thin-and-light laptops and mini workstations, particularly in AI workloads. The company also shared plenty of gaming and content creation benchmarks.

[...]

AMD also shared some rather impressive results showing a Llama 70B Nemotron LLM AI model running on both the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with 128GB of total system RAM (32GB for the CPU, 96GB allocated to the GPU) and a desktop Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 with 24GB of VRAM (details of the setups in the slide below). AMD says the AI Max+ 395 delivers up to 2.2X the tokens/second performance of the desktop RTX 4090 card, but the company didn’t share time-to-first-token benchmarks.

Perhaps more importantly, AMD claims to do this at an 87% lower TDP than the 450W RTX 4090, with the AI Max+ running at a mere 55W. That implies that systems built on this platform will have exceptional power efficiency metrics in AI workloads.

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

#276

Post by neom »

In case you're curious, I googled. It runs this thing called "DGX OS":

"DGX OS 6 Features The following are the key features of DGX OS Release 6:

Based on Ubuntu 22.04 with the latest long-term Linux kernel version 5.15 for the recent hardware and security updates and updates to software packages, such as Python and GCC.

Includes the NVIDIA-optimized Linux kernel, which supports GPU Direct Storage (GDS) without additional patches.

Provides access to all NVIDIA GPU driver branches and CUDA toolkit versions.

Uses the Ubuntu OFED by default with the option to install NVIDIA OFED for additional features.

Supports Secure Boot (requires Ubuntu OFED).

Supports DGX H100/H200."

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

#277

Post by axegon_ »

mycall wrote: post #237
axegon_ wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they seem to be doing everything right in the last few years About that... Not like there isn't a lot to be desired from the linux drivers: I'm running a K80 and M40 in a workstation at home and the thought of having to ever touch the drivers, now that the system is operational, terrifies me. It is by far the biggest "don't fix it if it ain't broke" thing in my life.

Buy a second system which you can touch?

That IS the second system (my AI home rig). I've given up on Nvidia for using it on my main computer because of their horrid drivers. I switched to Intel ARC about a month ago and I love it. The only downside is that I have a xeon on my main computer and Intel never really bothered to make ARC compatible with xeons so I had to hack my bios around, hoping I don't mess everything up. Luckily for me, it all went well so now I'm probably one of a dozen or so people worldwide to be running xeons + arc on linux. That said, the fact that I don't have to deal with nvidia's wretched linux drivers does bring a smile to my face.

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

#278

Post by tarsinge »

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!

> I sure wished I held some Nvidia stocks

I’m so tired of this recent obsession with the stock market. Now that retail is deeply invested it is tainting everything, like here on a technology forum. I don’t remember people mentioning Apple stock every time Steve Jobs made an announcement in the past decades. Nowadays it seems everyone is invested in Nvidia and just want the stock to go up, and every product announcement is a mean to that end. I really hope we get a crash so that we can get back to a more sane relation with companies and their products.

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

#279

Post by patrulek »

diggan wrote: post #254
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.

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

It doesnt have to be two enter/backspace/shift. Keyboard layout seems to be almost identical to Azio L70 Keyboard (at least the keys).

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

#280

Post by awestroke »

diggan wrote: post #257
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.

No, nobody will run windows on this. It's meant to run NVIDIAs own flavor of Ubuntu with a patched kernel
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