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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'

#481

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #399
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will always be cringe due to how so-called "AI" works. Since it's fundamentally just log-likelihood optimization under the hood, it will always be a statistically most average image. Which means it will always have that characteristic "plastic" and overdone look.

The current state of the art in AI image generation was unimaginable a few years back. The idea that it'll stay as-is for the next century seems... silly.

If you're talking about some sort of non-existent sci-fi future "AI" that isn't just log-likelihood optimization, then most likely such a fantastical thing wouldn't be using NVidia's GPU with CUDA.

This hardware is only good for current-generation "AI".

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

#482

Post by com2kid »

croes wrote: post #419
com2kid wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rumor has it they run queries at a profit, and most of the cost is in training and staff.

If they is true their path to profitability isn't super rocky. Their path to achieving their current valuation may end up being trickier though!

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

#483

Post by saagarjha »

sliken wrote: post #165
saagarjha wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M4 Max is 12 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, the former of which are basically the fastest single-core performance you can buy right now, and the latter of which have never been touched by any architecture for their energy class. It seems highly unlikely that what you say is the case.

The cortex X925 is pretty competitive. Seems similarly aggressive to the Apple M4. Both have 10 wide decode and disbatch, pretty exceptional single thread, and good overall performance. Seems close enough that it might well come down to if your application uses SVE (which the X925 has) or SME (which apple has). I believe generally SVE is much easier to use without using Apple proprietary libraries. Of if you need sig…

I guess you are talking about something different; I'm not really treating the cores as ML accelerators.

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

#485

Post by mfld »

a_bonobo wrote: post #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…

Small nitpick: Illumia is the owner of the sequencing market. But not really of the bioinformatics market.

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

#486

Post by trhway »

menaerus wrote: post #480
trhway wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> So, typical database operations, massively parallel in nature like join or filter, would run about that faster. Given workload A how much of the total runtime JOIN or FILTER would take in contrast to the storage engine layer for example? My gut feeling tells me not much since to see the actual gain you'd need to be able to parallelize everything including the storage engine challenges. IIRC all the startups buildin…

With cheap large RAMs and the SSD the storage has already became much less of an issue, especially when the database is primarily in-memory one.

How about attaching SSD based storage to NVLink? :) Nvidia does have the direct to memory tech and uses wide buses, so i don't see any issue for them to direct attach arrays of SSD if they feel like it.

>IIRC all the startups building databases around GPUs failed to deliver in the last ~10 years. All of them are shut down if I am not mistaken.

As i already said - model of database offloading some ops to GPU with its separate memory isn't feasible, and those startups confirmed it. Especially when GPU would be 8-16GB while the main RAM can easily be 1-2TB with 100-200 CPU cores. With 128GB unified memory like on GB10 the situation looks completely different (that Nvidia allows only 2 to be connected by NVLink is just a market segmentation not a real technical limitation).

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

#487

Post by rbanffy »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #439
rbanffy wrote: post #233

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…

There were Phi cards, but they were pricey and power hungry (at the time, now current GPU cards probably meet or exceed the Phi card's power consumption) for plugging into your home PC. A few years back there was a big fire sale on Phi cards - you could pick one up for like $200. But by then nobody cared.

Imagine if they were sold at cost in the beginning. Also, think about having one as the only CPU rather than a card.

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

#488

Post by hatboat »

Mistletoe wrote: post #99
option wrote: 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.

If they're already an "enthusiast, grad student, hacker", are they likely to choose the "plumbers and people that know how to build houses" career track?

True passion for one's career is rare, despite the clichéd platitudes ecouraging otherwise. That's something we should encourage and invest in regardless of the field.

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

#489

Post by bloomingkales »

adrian_b wrote: post #477
bmicraft wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thermal design power of a laptop CPU-dGPU combo is normally much higher than 120 W Normally? Much higher than 120W? Those are some pretty abnormal (and dare I say niche?) laptops you're talking about there. Remember, that's not peak power - thermal design power is what the laptop should be able to power and cool pretty much continuously. At those power levels, they're usually called DTR: desktop replacement. Yo…

Any laptop that in marketed as "gaming laptop" or "mobile workstation" belongs to this category. I do not know which is the proportion of gaming laptops and mobile workstations vs. thin and light laptops. While obviously there must be much more light laptops, the gaming laptops cannot be a niche product, because there are too many models offered by a lot of vendors. My own laptop is a Dell Precision, so it belongs to…

People are very unaware just how much better a gaming laptop from 3 years ago is (compared to a copilot laptop). These laptops are sub $500 on eBay, and Best Buy won’t give you more than $150 for it as a trade in (almost like they won’t admit that those laptops outclass the new category type of AI pc).

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

#490

Post by Havoc »

sliken wrote: post #444
Havoc wrote: post #207

Can one game on it? If one can skip buying gaming rig with a 5090 with its likely absurd price then this 3k becomes a lot easier for dual use hobbyists to swallow Edit 5090 is 2k

I'm not sure it has a video out. There is a AI produced image of the digit and a monitor though.

hmm...interesting point.

Putting a screen next to your product that doesn't have video out would be quite disingenuous though. So I'd be surprised if it has zero output at all.

...I guess there is a risk that it has an output but it's more like a CPU iGPU style basic output rather than being powered by the main GPU.

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