No thunderbolt is a big no for me. Its one of the greatest feature of MacbookPro that makes it dockable and expandable as a desktop with a good thunderbolt dock.
Nvidia RTX Spark
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Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#202I think this is the first time an ARM windows device gets marketed for gaming. Would be interesting to see what kind of performance hit games have on the x86 to ARM translation layer.
Rosetta on Mac was obviously impressive. There was also impressive Arm->Intel translation in the mobile ecosystem at one time.
One reason it works surprisingly well on modern systems is how much is offloaded to the GPU. You aren't going to get great power optimization or anything without it being truly native though.
There are games which are CPU limited though, and it will be interesting how those do. Curiously those also tend to be in engines with Arm support already.
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#203Can it work with Linux? That's all I care about.
DGX Spark comes with linux out of the box, it would be hard to imagine this device is not also compatible
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#204No thunderbolt is a big no for me. Its one of the greatest feature of MacbookPro that makes it dockable and expandable as a desktop with a good thunderbolt dock.
Thats also possible with usb-c.
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#205Can it work with Linux? That's all I care about.
Honestly this looks like Microsoft must have thrown a pile of money at them to not mention it, as it's just too obviously the main question.
No one seriously cares about this running Windows. We want Steam and CUDA/Ollama, and Windows just gets in the way. nVidia are simply not that oblivious, but I have to admit in their position I'd have considered the Microsoft involvement more trouble than it's worth, which is among the many reasons I'm not a billionaire.
Maybe they think the RAM market is so terrible it will kill the whole initiative regardless.
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#206Some competition for Apple in this space and competition for Intel and AMD is great. But I really do question how well Windows on Arm is really going to work out long term. For Apple it worked because they were able to force the issue. If you wanted a new Mac it was going to be Arm and we all knew eventually (this year or is it next year?) Intel support would drop. Over time we have seen M series exclusive features.…
I feel like making universal binaries a thing, and pushing for it to be standard is one viable path.
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#207For anyone curious to know how this will fare against Macbooks, at least in CPU perf: DGX Spark has the exact same GPU and CPU as the top RTX Spark laptops will, so you can just directly compare from that. Of course, DGX Spark is a miniPC, so laptops will likely be slower due to power limits/throttling.
DGX Spark is also $4700
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#208Can it work with Linux? That's all I care about.
This is strangely absent from the news.
There are two new things being announced here: the GB10 chip being put into laptops, and GB10 running Windows. GB10 running Linux is not news, it's a product that's been shipping since last fall.
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#209What 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."
It’s nivdia attempting to compete with Apple’s M-series
Their target competition is the AMD Strix Halo which is eating the Sparks lunch right now.
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#210Can it work with Linux? That's all I care about.
I don't think there's any incentive for Nvidia to make this a Windows-only device, so most likely it will be fully supported on Linux, just like their GPUs are.
> just like their GPUs are
So with proprietary blobs that give you more trouble that they're worth?