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

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

#231

Post by sandworm101 »

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.

Fast and public, or slow and private. Not everyone wants, or is allowed to, share their data with the AI world. And do not doubt that every bit shared with an AI service will be used for training.

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

#232

Post by hulitu »

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.

> And it's available in laptops today

Is there a desktop version ? For real work ?

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

#233

Post by epolanski »

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…

DeepSeek Flash v4 is the leading local AI on 128GB machines, and DS4 is still in preview (training not finished), no?

Especially on Dwarfstar.

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

#234

Post by Retr0id »

stego-tech wrote: post #197

The Unified Memory pool is what will continue to be the “game changer” in systems architecture, especially outside of data centers. The reality is even cutting edge games and consumer workloads don’t actually take full use of the PCIe bandwidth of the GPU or the bandwidth of its GDDR memory. Even local AI use cases don’t substantially or meaningfully benefit from faster memory, at least to average consumers. A unifie…

Memory safety is orthogonal to side-channels, and hardware-enforced isolation (e.g. IOMMU) is more powerful than compiler-enforced isolation (but both are good!)

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

#235

Post by epolanski »

smcleod wrote: post #122
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…

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…

Qwen suffers quantization a lot, rendering it borderline unusable.

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

#236

Post by hulitu »

alt227 wrote: post #212
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.

Why do people care so much about single core performance? We are all professionals here and I bet most of our workloads are multi core. I get that these new arm chips from Apple and Qualcomm are great at one thing at a time, but for professional workloads high end x64 chips still cannot be beaten on the desktop.

> Why do people care so much about single core performance?

Because that't the only part this chip excels.

People are comparing apples with oranges since ages.

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

#237

Post by epolanski »

greenavocado wrote: post #202
zozbot234 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qwen 3.6 is a toy compared to DeepSeek V4 Flash or Pro. These models can now run on Apple Silicon hardware with as little as 32GB RAM for the Flash (with 2-bit quant, which is still quite capable) using SSD offloading, with just-about-reasonable performance for interactive use, and far better performance on longer contexts than Qwen (due to the more efficient KV cache/attention mechanisms in DeepSeek). Very significa…

Qwen 3.6 27B still curb stomps Deepseek V4 in coding

1. Deepseek V4 is still in preview (training is not finished)

2. Qwen is much more demanding and borderline unusable on consumer hardware because it's a dense model. The 27B parameters are active all time for each token. It's not a MoE architecture where a router activates only some of them.

3. Qwen doesn't like quantization at all.

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

#238

Post by Remnant44 »

alt227 wrote: post #212
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.

Why do people care so much about single core performance? We are all professionals here and I bet most of our workloads are multi core. I get that these new arm chips from Apple and Qualcomm are great at one thing at a time, but for professional workloads high end x64 chips still cannot be beaten on the desktop.

I agree with you, but also:

outside of anything else, amdahls law means that as the parallel performance grows, we become _more_ limited by the inherently serial code, and thus single core performance, not less.

Given that single core performance is "harder" (can't just throw more cores/sockets at the problem), it's also critically important.

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

#239

Post by jayd16 »

Asmod4n wrote: post #204
stego-tech wrote: post #197

The Unified Memory pool is what will continue to be the “game changer” in systems architecture, especially outside of data centers. The reality is even cutting edge games and consumer workloads don’t actually take full use of the PCIe bandwidth of the GPU or the bandwidth of its GDDR memory. Even local AI use cases don’t substantially or meaningfully benefit from faster memory, at least to average consumers. A unifie…

yeah, you only see double digits in performance degradation from going from pcie 5 to 3 with a 5090 (at x16 speed), with everything else its like in the single digits area.

Well I mean, the idea with games is it all fits in vram. You really don't want to be thrashing. It's that things are still so slow that they must be avoided entirely, no?

No copy unified memory will help with that but you do pay the read speed costs.

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

#240

Post by dagmx »

storus wrote: post #179
dagmx wrote: post #76

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 SV…

> GPU compute (not rasterization) it’s between an M4 Pro and M4 Max without considering bandwidth You are likely thinking about token generation which is dependent on memory bandwidth where Apple has an edge. Spark's GPU compute is way higher than even M5 Max (17 FP32 TFlops), around 2x FP32 TFlops... It's literally 6144 CUDA cores like desktop 5070, slowed down by slow memory and lower TDP (29.7 vs 31 FP32 TFlops on…

That’s only if you consider FP32 specifically. On average the M5 Max will pull ahead for tasks like GPU raytracing (it’s currently the fastest mobile GPU for Blender rendering) and token generation and other things that benefit from the higher memory bandwidth.

I’d also mention that you’re comparing peaks which the RTX Spark won’t be hitting. The top TDP is less than that of the DGX Spark.

I just think anyone calling this a beast and a game changer are conflating/extrapolating from different form factors and constraints

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