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Nvidia DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem

simonwillison.net

31–40 of 116 posts

Re: Nvidia DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem

#31

Is 128 GB of unified memory enough? I've found that the smaller models are great as a toy but useless for anything realistic. Will 128 GB hold any model that you can do actual work with or query for answers that returns useful information?

the question is: how does the prompt processing time on this compare to M3 Ultra because that one sucks at RAG even though it can technically handle huge models and long contexts...

Re: Nvidia DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem

#32
About what I expected. The Jetson series had the same issues, mostly, at a smaller scale: Deviate from the anointed versions of YOLO, and nothing runs without a lot of hacking. Being beholden to CUDA is both a blessing and a curse, but what I really fear is how long it will take for this to become an unsupported golden brick.

Also, the other reviews I’ve seen point out that inference speed is slower than a 5090 (or on par with a 4090 with some tailwind), so the big difference here (other than core counts) is the large chunk of “unified” memory. Still seems like a tricky investment in an age where a Mac will outlive everything else you care to put on a desk and AMD has semi-viable APUs with equivalent memory architectures (even if RoCm is… well… not all there yet).

Curious to compare this with cloud-based GPU costs, or (if you really want on-prem and fully private) the returns from a more conventional rig.

Re: Nvidia DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem

#35
post #32

About what I expected. The Jetson series had the same issues, mostly, at a smaller scale: Deviate from the anointed versions of YOLO, and nothing runs without a lot of hacking. Being beholden to CUDA is both a blessing and a curse, but what I really fear is how long it will take for this to become an unsupported golden brick. Also, the other reviews I’ve seen point out that inference speed is slower than a 5090 (or o…

This thing is dramatically slower than a 4090 both in prefill and decode. And I do mean DRAMATICALLY.

I have no immediate numbers for prefill, but the memory bandwidth is ~4x greater on a 4090 which will lead to ~4x faster decode.

Re: Nvidia DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem

#36

Is 128 GB of unified memory enough? I've found that the smaller models are great as a toy but useless for anything realistic. Will 128 GB hold any model that you can do actual work with or query for answers that returns useful information?

Depending on you use-case, I've been quite impressed with GPT-OSS 20B with high reasoning effort.

The 120B model is better but too slow since I only have 16GB VRAM. That model runs decent[1] on the Spark.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45576737

Re: Nvidia DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem

#37
post #32

About what I expected. The Jetson series had the same issues, mostly, at a smaller scale: Deviate from the anointed versions of YOLO, and nothing runs without a lot of hacking. Being beholden to CUDA is both a blessing and a curse, but what I really fear is how long it will take for this to become an unsupported golden brick. Also, the other reviews I’ve seen point out that inference speed is slower than a 5090 (or o…

This is kind of an embedded 5070 with a massive amount of relatively slow memory, don't expect miracles.

Re: Nvidia DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem

#38

Is 128 GB of unified memory enough? I've found that the smaller models are great as a toy but useless for anything realistic. Will 128 GB hold any model that you can do actual work with or query for answers that returns useful information?

128gb unified memory is enough for pretty good models, but honestly for the price of this it is better just go go with a few 3090s or a Mac due to memory bandwidth limitations of this card

Re: Nvidia DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem

#39
An 14-inch M4 Max Macbook Pro with 128GB of RAM has a list price of $4700 or so and twice the memory bandwidth.

For inference decode the bandwidth is the main limitation so if running LLMs is your use case you should probably get a Mac instead.

Re: Nvidia DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem

#40
post #3

As is usual for NVidia: great hardware, an effing nightmare figuring out how to setup the pile of crap they call software.

If you think their software is bad try using any other vendor , makes nvidia looks amazing. Apple is only one close

Keep in mind this is part of Nvidias embedded offerings. So you will get one release of software ever, and that's gonna be pretty much it for the lifetime of the product.
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