Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 581 posts

Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#71

Post by dofm »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #53
chpatrick wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's niche now because getting the hardware to run it is expensive and the quantized models don't work as well. If those improve then it would be a no brainer to pay one off for the hardware instead of a fortune for API calls.

AI vendors are attempting to offer the whole apple. And they are spending huge sums of money in the process. But most businesses don't really care about most of the apple --- they only need their special bite out of it. For example, doctors mainly care about medicine. Nvidia is attempting to provide the hardware needed for local, specialized models.

I think it is likely to appeal to video and photo editors who want to use AI tools (the press release has a quote from Blackmagic Design, as well as from Adobe, who I think have no stomach for their own cloud AI).

But I don’t know about specialised: this could run quite large models with MoE.

Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#72

Post by root-parent »

infecto wrote: post #15

"I am not sure how many people will run AI models locally. It still seems like a niche application to me. However, it will make decent machines to play video games." I don't know who will be the winner but with some of the recent releases from gemma it seems more probable that you may run some models locally if only from a cost perspective, not even considering business security. Not sure how this type of architectur…

"I am not sure how many people will run AI models locally. It still seems like a niche application to me. However, it will make decent machines to play video games..."

This is the 2026 edition of Ken Olsen: "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home"

Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#73

Post by Zetaphor »

sandworm101 wrote: post #52
infecto wrote: post #15

"I am not sure how many people will run AI models locally. It still seems like a niche application to me. However, it will make decent machines to play video games." I don't know who will be the winner but with some of the recent releases from gemma it seems more probable that you may run some models locally if only from a cost perspective, not even considering business security. Not sure how this type of architectur…

Lots of people are already running AI locally. They are the people buying up all the consumer-grade nvidea gpus. What are they doing with them? Well, the same things people with home media or email servers are doing: stuff they dont want to share with the general public.

I want to reduce my dependency on companies like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Aside from the concerns of data sharing I'm also not a fan of how they run their operations, for example Anthropic now using xAI's Colossus data center which is poisoning a marginalized community, or OpenAI getting in bed with the military.

Not everything I want to use an LLM for requires "PhD level intelligence", and increasingly I'm finding more uses that involve sharing my personal data.

Yesterday my local model helped me when looking for a doctor who is in-network for my insurance. I threw it a screenshot from the providers search results and it looked up reviews for all of them.

Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#74

Post by wazdra »

unmole wrote: post #51
infecto wrote: post #15

"I am not sure how many people will run AI models locally. It still seems like a niche application to me. However, it will make decent machines to play video games." I don't know who will be the winner but with some of the recent releases from gemma it seems more probable that you may run some models locally if only from a cost perspective, not even considering business security. Not sure how this type of architectur…

> you may run some models locally if only from a cost perspective I have a hard time believing running a model on a laptop will be cheaper than running it in a datacenter. Why wouldn't economies of scale apply here as with every other computation?

This is assuming that you'll be priced the fraction of computing that you consumed. But you are actually paying for their infrastructure, for the R&D (and also the computation that went into training the model) etc. It is not clear that, for your own small computations, this kind of costs are needed, but you will still pay your share in the investment the provider made so that they could serve everyone's computation needs.

Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#75

Post by kimixa »

flakiness wrote: post #39
seanalltogether wrote: post #11

Is it really unified memory? AMD Strix Halo is "unified" but you still have to allocate memory separately for cpu vs gpu. Apple Silicon is true unified memory.

My understanding is that this is the limitation from Windows not from AMD SoC. There are several internet resources to "enable unified memory support" on linux eg [1]. As a side note, qualcomm chip set on Android has been doing this for years (like Apple) so it's not super unique thing. It's more like there was no need before. [1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/increasing-vram-alloc...

Even then the "reserved" section is a carve out guaranteed chunk to allow stuff that might need contiguous physical memory (display scan out buffers and page tables, for example) and similar.

The GPU can still happily use all the rest of the memory for other use cases - which tend to be the bulk of allocations anyway. Though there might be performance implications - for example "moving" buffer ownership to the GPU would need to evict CPU caches, and often 4k pages and tlb lookups can be a pretty inefficient situation for GPU-style accesses.

That's been pretty standard for any SoC for decades. And "differences" to apple's SoC are more implementation details.

Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#76

Post by dagmx »

This feels fluff to me on the part of the author (whose work I don’t want to trivialize) but I don’t think they’ve actually looked deeper than a paper spec sheet on this.

1. Yes it has the same number of cores as a 5070 mobile. It’s also running at a shared peak of 2/3 the bandwidth and a shared peak of 2/3 the TDP. The GPU by itself will likely perform at half the dedicated units performance

2. Apple may not have SVE2 but they do have the AMX (private) and SME. I don’t see why he thinks the SVE2 will give him more performance than the SME.

3. He mentions a single core type but doesn’t mention the total makeup. We already have known for a year how the DGX Spark compares to Apple chips. For CPU it’s roughly equivalent to an M3 Pro and for GPU compute (not rasterization) it’s between an M4 Pro and M4 Max without considering bandwidth.

The real advantage to these is that they run CUDA. That’s it. Otherwise when they launch they’ll be 2-3 generations behind where Apple is and 1 gen behind AMD.

The other super power of the DGX Spark was the NIC for pairing them together. But that’s been removed here too.

Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#77

Post by AaronAPU »

root-parent wrote: post #72
infecto wrote: post #15

"I am not sure how many people will run AI models locally. It still seems like a niche application to me. However, it will make decent machines to play video games." I don't know who will be the winner but with some of the recent releases from gemma it seems more probable that you may run some models locally if only from a cost perspective, not even considering business security. Not sure how this type of architectur…

"I am not sure how many people will run AI models locally. It still seems like a niche application to me. However, it will make decent machines to play video games..." This is the 2026 edition of Ken Olsen: "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home"

That’s too strong of an assertion.

Local models aren’t deterministically equivalent in capabilities to foundation models. Home computers are turing complete; just like a mainframe. They are just slower. Often not slower enough to matter.

Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#78

Post by nkurz »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #30
infecto wrote: post #15

"I am not sure how many people will run AI models locally. It still seems like a niche application to me. However, it will make decent machines to play video games." I don't know who will be the winner but with some of the recent releases from gemma it seems more probable that you may run some models locally if only from a cost perspective, not even considering business security. Not sure how this type of architectur…

> "Ranked in the top 2% of scientists globally (Stanford/Elsevier 2025) and among GitHub's top 1000 developers" - side note but this guy puts this everywhere, gives me probably the inverse of what he is marketing for. Lol yeah seriously, that stinks "I ask AI to generate a huge amount of bullshit and upload it to pad irrelevant stats". Absolute loser.

I agree that it sends the wrong symbol, but actually Daniel is great. He cares tremendously about doing work that is actually real-world useful. I've co-written a few papers with him, and he's really hard working and open to outside suggestions. The danger is that if you send him comments, he'll eventually manage to rope you into writing a new and improved version. Seriously, if you are a non-academic computer scientist with a good idea that you want to publish, he'd be incredibly open to working with you.

As to why he now has this on his blog? I also cringe when I read it. I presume someone told him he should self-promote more, and this is his lame attempt to do so. He's almost certainly the most cited person in his department, but it's entirely possible that none of his colleagues actually know this. Cut him some slack. Self-promotion is not his strength. He's a nerd's nerd, and not a marketer. I'll mention to him that his attempt here might be backfiring when I'm next in contact with him.

Re: Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

#80

Post by nkurz »

Zetaphor wrote: post #67
netsharc wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found his website, https://www.lemire.me/en/ , and the "2%" brag is the very first sentence, geez. Being the top x% is what OnlyFans girls brag about, professor... And it's not exactly brain surgery, is it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I

> Daniel Lemire’s blog is one of the top 50 most popular blogs on Hacker News, the standard tech news aggregation site. Citation needed

https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/
Post reply on HN