Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by modeless » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:36 PM UTC

darkwater wrote: post #141

modeless wrote: post #119

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme trounces Nvidia's chip in single core CPU performance. It beats Intel and AMD's best, too. It has unified memory. It's the only CPU in the same league as Apple's M-series in both CPU performance and power efficiency. And it's available in laptops today, not later this year. People are sleeping on Qualcomm.

Is it well supported under Linux?

Qualcomm has been upstreaming Linux support for some of their chips but they're not working fast enough and I don't think the latest chips are there yet unfortunately.

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

#152

Post by michaelcampbell » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:37 PM UTC

parineum wrote: post #93

throw0101a wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the 2026 edition of Ken Olsen: "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home" Digging into this: > In conclusion, there is evidence that Ken Olsen did doubt the need for computers in the home, but the evidence is based primarily on the testimony of David Ahl who was perturbed when the personal computer project he championed at DEC was not supported by Olsen in 1974. > Olsen’s resistance may…

It doesn't really need this much explanation. People take these quotes out of context all the time. Said in a business context, there was no need, at that time, for someone to have a personal computer. There's no business justification in 1977 for a personal computer department at a business. It's similar to the gates quote about RAM (I think it was 64KB?). These statements aren't meant to be forever quotes. Their bu…

> It's similar to the gates quote about RAM (I think it was 64KB?)

640, and Bill Gates said he either never said that, or at least never remembered having said it. I think there is no evidence anywhere that he did.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1563853/the-640k-quote...

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

#153

Post by derefr » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:37 PM UTC

bradfa wrote: post #125

modeless wrote: post #119

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme trounces Nvidia's chip in single core CPU performance. It beats Intel and AMD's best, too. It has unified memory. It's the only CPU in the same league as Apple's M-series in both CPU performance and power efficiency. And it's available in laptops today, not later this year. People are sleeping on Qualcomm.

Qualcomm is a “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, you don’t fool me twice” kind of situation. So many horrible experiences in the past that people are going to be hesitant. Qualcomm are trying harder now it seems. But it will take time to repair their reputation in the PC market.

Can you say more? I don't have any memory of Qualcomm-related scandals(?), but I just read the news; I've never really been a user of their chips.

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

#154

Post by thewebguyd » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:38 PM UTC

bradfa wrote: post #125

modeless wrote: post #119

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme trounces Nvidia's chip in single core CPU performance. It beats Intel and AMD's best, too. It has unified memory. It's the only CPU in the same league as Apple's M-series in both CPU performance and power efficiency. And it's available in laptops today, not later this year. People are sleeping on Qualcomm.

Qualcomm is a “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, you don’t fool me twice” kind of situation. So many horrible experiences in the past that people are going to be hesitant. Qualcomm are trying harder now it seems. But it will take time to repair their reputation in the PC market.

They burned me with the first gen Snapdragon X Elite. Before the various laptops with it were out they promised Linux support. Here we are, years alter, still no fully OOTB support. Ironically, the GPU firmware were just mainlined in the kernel 4 months ago, but they still haven't done the same for the 1st gen X elite.

Tuxedo computers tried and didn't succeed either.

I will never buy Qualcomm again. I avoid them on phones as well by just buying Apple. They do not support their hardware beyond the release.

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

#155

Post by jb1991 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:40 PM UTC

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…

He’s just a braggart. When you see something like this in somebody’s personal bio on social media, it’s basically a banner that means “take everything I say in the context of me promoting myself.”

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

#156

Post by wslh » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:42 PM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #83

root-parent wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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"

> This is the 2026 edition of Ken Olsen: "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home" Digging into this: > In conclusion, there is evidence that Ken Olsen did doubt the need for computers in the home, but the evidence is based primarily on the testimony of David Ahl who was perturbed when the personal computer project he championed at DEC was not supported by Olsen in 1974. > Olsen’s resistance may…

The simple explanation is that predicting the future is generally impossible. It doesn't matter if it's Olsen or anybody else.

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

#157

Post by thewebguyd » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #143

sandworm101 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people are ok with slower. An AI that lets you edit a family picture, in say 30 seconds, locally is preferable to one that is instantaneous but requires you to submit that picture to examination/storage/training/sale in someone else's AI ecosystem. If i want to crop my ex out of family photos, i should not have to first give that photo to Microsoft. If want an LLM to write a book report for me, i dont want it al…

I'd like to think so but the existence of Google and Apple and Microsoft's cloud based photo tools with phone integration suggests that's false. You could run a pretty good home server on $50 of gear and yet we never saw any real adoption of OwnCloud/NextCloud style products as an alternative to Google Drive/Photos or Apple Cloud. Why should LLM/Transformers be any different? Especially when you need a proper expensi…

Apple's photo tools run on device, and they'll probably ship more on device foundation models at WWDC too.

On-device AI is going to be important, I think. It doesn't have to take the form of a chatbot UI to be useful.

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

#158

Post by derefr » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #132

smcleod wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qwen 3.6 is far ahead of Gemma for most (but not all) things. I've deployed it out across a number of M5 MacBooks and it's genuinely useful for many tasks. It won't replace an Opus or current gen Sonnet sized model but it's still amazingly good for its size and probably as good as or just a bit before Sonnet 4 era. Far more reliable for tool calling, coding, agentic tasks and faster than the Gemma models especially w…

I've got a Qwen 3.5 running on a 12GB 3060 and it's dumb as a stump but still smart enough to get some useful work done. Since it's my daily driver desktop I havent jumped to 3.6 since last time I did I quickly ran out of vram and locked the desktop environment. But yeah, the Qwen line is pretty impressive on commodity hardware.

I must be using LLMs very differently than y'all, because I can't think of a single thing I would rely on an LLM that's "dumb as a stump" to do for me.

To me, LLMs are for asking research questions + exploring design spaces + pointing at codebases to investigate bugs. And those all benefit from the model being as "smart" (in terms of both fluid intelligence and burned-in knowledge) as possible.

I'm guessing there exist problems where "intelligence past a certain point" doesn't matter, so these medium-sized models can match the performance of the bigger models. But what problems might those be?

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

#159

Post by spwa4 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

parineum wrote: post #96

sandworm101 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people are ok with slower. An AI that lets you edit a family picture, in say 30 seconds, locally is preferable to one that is instantaneous but requires you to submit that picture to examination/storage/training/sale in someone else's AI ecosystem. If i want to crop my ex out of family photos, i should not have to first give that photo to Microsoft. If want an LLM to write a book report for me, i dont want it al…

> Most people are ok with slower. An AI that lets you edit a family picture, in say 30 seconds, locally is preferable to one that is instantaneous but requires you to submit that picture to examination/storage/training/sale in someone else's AI ecosystem. Maybe if you ask them that question, but if you show them two products, they'll definitely prefer the faster one. 30 seconds is a long time to watch a progress bar.

Plus there's the other question. If this thing is slower ... what's the price? The desktop/mini-pc version of this is $3000, after all. At this performance level what is an acceptable price for the laptops?

People definitely aren't going to accept more expensive + slower ...

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

#160

Post by embedding-shape » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #149

embedding-shape wrote: post #90

> up to 6,144 state-of-the-art CUDA cores A RTX Pro 6000 has ~24K 5th generation tensor cores, I'm guessing this would then be 1/4 of the count but 6th generation? Wasn't clear from the images.

What is more important than core count is how the caching architecture is laid out. They could lay out those 6k cuda cores in a layout which provides much larger blocks of cache to smaller number of cores. That would increase the memory bandwidth which would be better for inference.

Sounds like the memory bandwidth is worse though;

> The memory is not as fast as dedicated GPU memory, but it is cheap enough while delivering enough bandwidth to run AI models locally.

Also "cheap while delivering enough" certainly sounds like someone is trying to temper expectations. It sounds like something sitting in-between GPU+VRAM inference and CPU+RAM one, not as a step above/besides GPU+VRAM.