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

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411–420 of 510 posts

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

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farmville style games underwent similar explosive estimates of growth, up until they collapsed. Much of the growth in gaming of late has come from exploitive dark patterns, and those dark patterns eventually stop working because users become immune to them.

>Farmville style games underwent similar explosive estimates of growth, up until they collapsed. They did not collapse, they moved to smartphones. The "free"-to-play gacha portion of the gaming market is so successful it is most of the market. "Live service" games are literally traditional game makers trying to grab a tiny slice of that market, because it's infinitely more profitable than making actual games. >those…

> Slot machines have been around for generations and have not become any less effective.

Slot machines are not a growth market. The majority of people wised to them literal generations ago, although enough people remain susceptible to maintain a handful of city economies.

> They did not collapse, they moved to smartphones

Agreed, but the dark patterns being used are different. The previous dark patterns became ineffective. The level of sophistication of psychological trickery in modern f2p games is far beyond anything Farmville ever attempted.

The rise of live service games also does not bode well for infinite growth in the industry as there's only so many hours to go around each day for playing games and even the evilest of player manipulation techniques can only squeeze so much blood from a stone.

The industry is already seeing the failure of new live service games to launch, possibly analogous to what happened in the MMO market when there was a rush of releases after WoW. With the exception of addicts, most people can only spend so many hours a day playing games.

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

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sad to see big companies like intel and amd don't understand this And it's not like they were never bitten (Intel has) by this before.

Intel does have https://www.clearlinux.org/

At least they don’t suffer from a lack of onboarding paths for x86, and it seems they are doing a nice job with their dGPUs.

Still unforgivable that their new CPUs hit the market without excellent Linux support.

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

#413
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> these databases can be executed on GPU with a significant performance gain vs. CPU No, they can’t. GPU databases are niche products with severe limitations. GPUs are fast at massively parallel math problems, they anren’t useful for all tasks.

>GPU databases are niche products with severe limitations. today. For the reasons like i mentioned. >GPUs are fast at massively parallel math problems, they anren’t useful for all tasks. GPU are fast at massively parallel tasks. Their memory bandwidth is 10x of that of the CPU for example. So, typical database operations, massively parallel in nature like join or filter, would run about that faster. Majority of compu…

The unified memory is no faster for the GPU than the CPU. So its not 10x the CPU. HBM on a GPU is much faster.

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

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digits is petaflops of FP4, roadrunner is petaflops of FP32. So at least a factor of 8 difference, but in practice much more. (IE I strongly doubt digits can do 1/8th petaflop of FP32) Beyond that, the factors seem reasonable for 2 decades?

Why even use a floating point if you have only 4 bits? Models with INT8 features are not unheard of.

1 sign and 3 exponent bits. AFAIK at the small number of bits it’s basically a teeny tiny look up table so you can precompute the table to be whatever math you want. Having an exponent instead of mantissa just means that the values that can be expressed are not linearly separated.

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

#415
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something every company should make sure they have: an onboarding path. Xeon Phi failed for a number of reasons, but one where it didn't need to fail was availability of software optimised for it. Now we have Xeons and EPYCs, and MI300C's with lots of efficient cores, but we could have been writing software tailored for those for 10 years now. Extracting performance from them would be a solved problem at this…

Raptor Computing provides POWER9 workstations. They're not cheap, still use last-gen hardware (DDR4/PCIe 4 ... and POWER9 itself) but they're out there. https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html

It kind of defeats the purpose of an onboarding platform if it’s more expensive than the one you think of moving away from.

IBM should see some entry-level products as loss leaders.

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

#416
post #276

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 addit…

Nvidia optimize meaning non-public patches, a non-upgradable operating system like what happens if you upgrade with a binary blob Nvidia driver?

You can upgrade to a newer release of DGX OS.

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

#417
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really mystifies me that Intel AMD and other hardware companies obviously Nvidia in this case Don't either have a consortium or each have their own in-house Linux distribution with excellent support. Windows has always been a barrier to hardware feature adoption to Intel. You had to wait 2 to 3 years, sometimes longer, for Windows to get around us providing hardware support. Any OS optimizations in Windows you had…

From the consumer perspective, it seems that MSFT has provided scheduler changes fairly rapidly for CPU changes, like X3D, P/e cores, etc. At least within a couple of months, if not at release. Amd/Intel work directly with Microsoft for shipping new silicon that would otherwise require it.

> From the consumer perspective, it seems that MSFT has provided scheduler changes fairly rapidly

Now they have some competition. This is relatively new, and Satya Nadella reshaped the company because of that.

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

#419
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

OpenAI built a 3 billion dollar business in less than 3 years of a commercial offering.

3 billion revenue and 5 billion loss doesn’t sound like a sustainable business model.

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

#420
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 nVidia price is closer (USD 3k) to a top Mac mini but I trust Apple more for the end-to-end support from hardware to apps than nVidia. Not an Apple fanboy but an user/dev, and I don't think we realize what Apple really achieved, industrially speaking. The M1 was launched in late 2020.
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