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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'

#491

Post by andirk »

dotancohen wrote: post #386
lolinder wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very important point. In general, Nvidia's relationship with Linux has been... complicated. On the one hand, at least they offer drivers for it. On the other, I have found few more reliable ways to irreparably break a Linux installation than trying to install or upgrade those drivers. They don't seem to prioritize it as a first class citizen, more just tolerate it the bare minimum required to claim it works…

> Nvidia's relationship with Linux has been... complicated. For those unfamiliar with Linus Torvalds' two-word opinion of Nvidia: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OF_5EKNX0Eg

Wow. Torvalds' distaste for Nvidia from that, albeit 12 year old, clip leaves little to the imagination. Re: gaming GPUs, Windows is their main OS, but is that the main reason why Huang only mentioned Windows in his CES 2025 keynote? Their gaming chips are a small portion of the company now. But they want to focus dev on Windows??

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

#492

Post by rbanffy »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #438
p_ing wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They're not offering POWER10 either because IBM closed the firmware again. Stupid move.

Raptor's value proposition is a 100% free and open platform, from the firmware and up, but, if they were willing to compromise on that, they'd be able to launch a POWER10 box.

Not sure it'd competitive in price with other workstation class machines. I don't know how expensive IBM's S1012 desk side is, but with only 64 threads, it'd be a meh workstation.

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

#493

Post by rbanffy »

andirk wrote: post #491
dotancohen wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nvidia's relationship with Linux has been... complicated. For those unfamiliar with Linus Torvalds' two-word opinion of Nvidia: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OF_5EKNX0Eg

Wow. Torvalds' distaste for Nvidia from that, albeit 12 year old, clip leaves little to the imagination. Re: gaming GPUs, Windows is their main OS, but is that the main reason why Huang only mentioned Windows in his CES 2025 keynote? Their gaming chips are a small portion of the company now. But they want to focus dev on Windows??

Nvidia has its own Linux distribution, DGX OS, based on Ubuntu LTS, but installing other Linux distros on machines with Nvidia GPUs is less than ideal.

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

#494

Post by dotancohen »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #414
dotancohen wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Having an exponent instead of mantissa just means that the values that can be expressed are not linearly separated.

Being expressed as 1 10 100 1000 is not really different than being expressed as 1 2 3 4. There's still only four bits, i.e. 16 different possible values, no matter how we decide to express that in human-friendly terms.

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

#495

Post by Vilian »

robhlt wrote: post #400
stabbles wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that the majority of their revenue is from data centers instead of Windows gaming PCs, you'd think their relationship with Linux should improve or already has.

They have been making real improvements the last few years. Most of their proprietary driver code is in firmware now, and the kernel driver is open-source[1] (the userland-side is still closed though). They've also significantly improved support for wayland and stopped trying to force eglstreams on the community. Wayland+nvidia works quite well now, especially after they added explicit sync support. 1. https://github…

Because red hat announced that next RHEl is going tone Wayland only, that why they fixed all that you said, they don't care about users, only servers

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

#496

Post by Vilian »

lioeters wrote: post #349
tarsinge wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 announceme…

> hope we get a crash That's the best time to buy. ;)

But if you buy and it crash, you lose the money, no?

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

#497

Post by godelski »

lolinder wrote: post #449
godelski wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I update drivers regularly. I've only had one display failure and was solved by a simple rollback. To be a bit fair (:/) it was specifically a combination of new beta driver and a newer kernel. It's definitely improved a ton since 10 years ago I just would not update them except very carefully.

I've bricked multiple systems just running apt install on the Nvidia drivers. I have no idea how, but I run the installation, everything works fine, and then when I reboot I can't even boot. That was years ago, but it happened multiple times and I've been very cautious ever since.

Interesting. I've never had that issue (~15 years experience) but I always had CPUs with graphics drivers. Do you think that might be it? The danger zone was always at `startx` and never before. (I still buy CPUs with graphics drivers because I think it is always good to have a fallback and hey, sometimes I want to sacrifice graphics for GPU compute :)

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

#498

Post by teleforce »

This is it guys, the most valuable company in the world is selling Linux desktop, after decades of speculating finally the year of Linux desktop is 2025!

Joking aside, personally will buy this workstation in a heartbeat if I have the budget to spare, one in the home and another in the office.

Currently I have an desktop/workstation for AI workloads with similar 128GB RAM that I bought few years back that cost around USD5K without the NVIDIA GPU that I bought earlier for about USD1.5K, with a total of about USD6.5K without a display monitor. This the same price of NeXT workstation (with a monitor) when it's sold back in 1988 without adjusting for inflations (now around USD18K) but it is more than 200 times faster in CPU speed and more than 1000 times RAM capacity than the original 25 MHz CPU and 4 MB RAM, respectively. The later updated version of NeXT has graphic accelerator with 8 MB VRAM, since the workstation has RTX 2080 it is about 1000 times more. I believe the updated NeXT with graphic accelerator is the one that used to develop original Doom software [1].

If NVIDIA can sell the Project Digits Linux desktop at USD3K with similar or more powerful setup configurations, it's going to be a winner and probably can sell by truckloads. It seems to has NeXT workstation vibe to it that used to develop the original WWW and Doom software. Hopefully it will be used to develop many innovative software but now using open source Linux software eco-system not proprietary one.

The latest Linux kernel now has real-time capability for more responsive desktop experience and as saying goes, good things come to those who wait.

[1] NeXT Computer:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_Computer

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

#499

Post by seanmcdirmid »

rbanffy wrote: post #435
johndough wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the skills to write efficient CUDA kernels, but $2/hr is 10% of my salary, so no way I'm renting any H100s. The electricity price for my computer is already painful enough as is. I am sure there are many eastern European developers who are more skilled and get paid even less. This is a huge waste of resources all due to NVIDIA's artificial market segmentation. Or maybe I am just cranky because I want more VRAM…

This has 128GB of unified memory. A similarly configured Mac Studio costs almost twice as much, and I'm not sure the GPU is on the same league (software support wise, it isn't, but that's fixable). A real shame it's not running mainline Linux - I don't like their distro based on Ubuntu LTS.

$4,799 for an M2 Ultra with 128GB of RAM, so not quite twice as much. I'm not sure what the benchmark comparison would be. $5,799 if you want an extra 16 GPU cores (60 vs 76).

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

#500

Post by aparashk »

z4y5f3 wrote: post #50
sliken wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how to judge better price/perf. I wouldn't expect 20 Neoverse N2 cores to do particularly well vs 16 zen5 cores. The GPU side looks promising, but they aren't mentioning memory bandwidth, configuration, spec, or performance. Did see vague claims of "starting at $3k", max 4TB nvme, and max 128GB ram. I'd expect AMD Strix Halo (AI Max plus 395) to be reasonably competitive.

NVIDIA is likely citing 1 PFlops at FP 4 sparse (they did this for GB200), so that is 128 TFlops BF16 dense, or 2/3 of what RTX 4090 is capable of. I would put the memory bandwidth at 546 GBps, using the same 512 bit LPDDR5X 8533 Mbps as Apple M4 max.

I can't see how this will work in terms of a TDP. 2/3 of the 4090 power would be several times more power than can be effectively cooled in the physical form factor of an Apple Mini. Either there is severe downclocking happening under full throttle, or NVIDIA have come up with more low power design mojo than Apple has been able to muster for the M4 Max.
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