After nvidia's many years of neglecting Linux, paired with direct Microsoft's involvement? Are we going to trust them, to allow installing Linux in these easily? I don't think so. This most likely be a winmodem situation, again
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Nvidia RTX Spark
161–170 of 437 posts
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#162This may finally be the chip family ARM on Windows has always needed. Qualcomm's chips have always been dogs with slow off-the-shelf ARM CPU cores that have pathetic single-threaded performance compared to x86 AMD/Intel or ARM Apple Silicon designs.
These chips also appear to be using off-the-shelf ARM cores.
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#163It was wintel (windows + intel) before. This will be what? Windia? Wintek?
Winvidia
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#164What is this product anyway? Is it a general purpose CPU or is it specifically designed for MS Windows? Nvidia stepping back from the open source? "Introducing the NVIDIA RTX Spark™ Superchip. The fusion of NVIDIA AI and RTX graphics in a single chip redefines Windows PCs and delivers amazing creating, AI development, and gaming—on the slimmest, most beautiful RTX laptops ever and small, ultra-efficient desktops."
I wouldn't say it's Nvidia stepping back from open source... if anything this is doubling down on it, as one of the selling points of this is the 128GB of unified memory which will allow for hosting local models (i.e, nvidia's new open model they just released). I guess it's pretty cool, I'm a big supporter of local LLMs/open weight models so seems enticing to me, although I'm not sure this will be super applicable to a lot of regular consumers. Seems like a pretty niche product.
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or get an AMD 395 laptop or mini PC for half the price of an equivalent mac device
https://www.bosgamepc.com/products/bosgame-m5-ai-mini-deskto... Bosgame M5 AI Mini Desktop Ryzen AI Max+ 395 96GB variant €1.800,95 (sold out) 128GB+2TB variant €2.401,95 (in stock) I have the latter, it's fantastic
$600 for 32GB ram seems bananas
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#166This may finally be the chip family ARM on Windows has always needed. Qualcomm's chips have always been dogs with slow off-the-shelf ARM CPU cores that have pathetic single-threaded performance compared to x86 AMD/Intel or ARM Apple Silicon designs.
This will likely have worse single threaded performance than recent Qualcomm CPUs.
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#167I didn't see this in the article but elsewhere I've seen the memory bandwidth quoted as 600GB/s [1]. For comparison:
- 5090/6000 Pro: 1792GB/s
- 5080:: 960GB/s
- 5070Ti: 892GB/s
- M3 Ultra: 819GB/s
- DGX Spark: 273GB/s (less than an M5 Pro at 307GB/s)
Memory bandwidth isn't everything but it will cap inference rate pretty heavily. Also, the M3 Ultra is for an almost 2 year old Mac Studio. It's widely expected that it'll be refreshed in Q3 with a likely M5 or M4 Ultra with >1000GB/s. I really hope Apple realizes what a market opportunity Apple has here.
The above shows just how good value the 5090 really is. It basically a RTX 6000 Pro with less RAM (and ~12% fewer CUDA units), which is a ~$10k card, for 20-30% of the price. This also demonstrates how NVidia uses VRAM for market segmentation. As an aside, the true data center cards (eg B100, H100) use HBM memory at ~3.2TB/s.
[1]: https://wccftech.com/nvidia-enters-pc-space-with-rtx-spark/
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#168It was wintel (windows + intel) before. This will be what? Windia? Wintek?
Nvideous
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about the desktop version? It seemed like it is not a dgx since it has the CPUs cores done by mediatek
They didn't say that Mediatek made the cpu sores. Grace is NVidia's own cpu arm cores. I bet that Mediatek made other parts of SoC necessary for a notebook
NVIDIA hasn't done custom CPU cores for anything they've yet branded "Grace". The original Grace data center CPU (paired with the Hopper data center GPU) used ARM Neoverse V2 cores. The "GB10" chip shipped in DGX Spark and announced here for RTX Spark uses Cortex X925 and Cortex A725 CPU cores.
Physically, NVIDIA did the GPU chiplet and Mediatek did the other chiplet that has the CPU, DRAM controller, and IO.
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#170I have no idea how powerful or power efficient these guys are, but this seems to be the first step in a bigger push towards Windows on ARM (without loosing gaming). I think more announcements will follow soon from other companies.
My DGX Sparks are the first and only devices I have with 200W USB-C PD. Low power by AI workstation standards, but intolerable in a laptop.
Intolerable? Why?