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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

#361

Post by MBCook »

Rohansi wrote: post #358
MBCook wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Let’s define terms, as others have pointed out they’re not perfect. Unified memory is what Apple is doing, other phones do, and many low end built in GPUs have done in PCs for ages. There is only one physical memory pool. Both the CPU and GPU can access it at full speed. This means no copying between pools of memory. No speed penalty accessing the CPU memory from GPU or vice versa. If the GPU only needs 2 GB to d…

Yes, I know there is an actual difference vs. dedicated GPUs with their own VRAM. I say it's marketing because Apple popularized the unified memory term even though, as you said, it existed in iGPUs long before Apple Silicon and was called shared GPU memory. > I don’t know if expandable memory is possible It technically is. These new systems (mostly) get their high bandwidth by using more channels (wider bus) of norm…

Bandwidth by going wider, not faster. That makes sense.

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

#362

Post by crazygringo »

GuestFAUniverse wrote: post #88

And who in 2026 is still anal-fixated on a "Windows" PC? It's just a personal computer. It normally runs multiple operating systems just fine. Windows PC sounds like people talking about tech who are either payed by M$, or embed pictures into Word documents to send them. Nobody has to kill the fun those OS agnostic machine allow, by artificially bind them to a shitty OS.

> And who in 2026 is still anal-fixated on a "Windows" PC?

I'm assuming it's just clarifying this isn't about Macs.

The term "PC" is ambiguous, since it can either refer to all personal computers in its original meaning, or to the IBM PC lineage that is mainly contrasted with Macs. Remember the famous "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads.

When you just say "PC", people today genuinely don't know which meaning you are referring to. And "IBM PC" is antiquated, and "IBM PC clone" is even worse. So "Windows PC" is a pretty decent name.

Do you have a better suggestion? Because "Non-Mac PC" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. If you say "Windows PC", everyone knows what you mean.

And it's not an "anal fixation", there's no need to be gratuitously insulting.

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

#363

Post by QQ00 »

VortexLain wrote: post #325

I really hope this will have proper GNU/Linux support, otherwise it will end up the same way Qualcomm ARM PCs did.

guaranteed it will be like Qualcomm arm, it's a partnership with Microsoft after all. we may see a community project to make Linux work on it but it will not have an official first class support and many things will likely not work properly.

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

#364

Post by GeekyBear »

cm2187 wrote: post #307
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…

And conveniently, by making your machine non upgradeable, it allows the manufacturer to enforce market segmentation / charge a huge premium for small RAM upgrade ( a la Apple)

Until LPCAMM2 came along, using low power LPDDR RAM meant soldiering RAM to the motherboard.

If you wanted to get sleep right and improve battery life, that was the trade off.

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

#365

Post by simonebrunozzi »

jmyeet wrote: post #213
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…

Unified memory is only a feature because NVidia so aggressively uses VRAM for market segmentation. The 5090 ($2k MSRP but realistically $3-3.5k) is almost the same as the RTX 6000 Pro (~$10k). Same memory bandwidth (1800GB/s). Slightly different CUDA cores (21k vs 24k). Big difference? VRAM (32GB vs 96GB). NVidia ultimately doesn't want to upset this segmentation so the RTX Spark will never undermine their other offe…

What should Apple do, in your view, to "embrace" it?

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

#366

Post by QQ00 »

SwtCyber wrote: post #33

The interesting part to me isn't really the Cortex-X925 vs AVX-512 comparison, but Nvidia trying to make the GPU the center of a Windows PC rather than an add-in card

>but Nvidia trying to make the GPU the center of a Windows PC rather than an add-in card

over the last decade, many software (especially the popular and industry standard ones) shifted to GPU accelerated design. it's a push before NVIDIA even tried to capitalize on that.

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

#367

Post by Pxtl »

JMiao wrote: post #320
Pxtl wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We didn't get people buying family-level file servers for the family photo gallery and documents at any real scale, so i doubt we'll see similar for AI especially when the cost is that much higher for GPUs vs an SBC machine.

because nas hardware and software suck and everything else was a poorly executed subscription product...i think one was called helm, another was by early twitter alumni. imagine a home device that manages and maintains itself and is a joy to interact with.

And why would the hypothetical "OwnAI" product be any different?

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

#368

Post by Izikiel43 »

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…

> The Unified Memory pool is what will continue to be the “game changer” in systems architecture, especially outside of data centers.

The ps4 was the prime example of this, and how it could run so many great games.

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

#369

Post by zozbot234 »

ColonelPhantom wrote: post #359
epolanski wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Deepseek V4 Flash still has 13B active params though? That is about half as many as Qwen3.6-27B (and much more than Qwen3.6-35B-A3B). Given that RAM (even on a base M4 or 'regular' Intel/AMD system) is like an order of magnitude faster than an SSD, even Qwen 27B running from RAM will be much faster than any Deepseek V4 model with SSD offloading. And the MoE will be much faster still. Qwen 27B is also small enough to…

> even Qwen 27B running from RAM will be much faster than any Deepseek V4 model with SSD offloading.

If you have reasonable amounts of RAM to cache the most likely experts, that's not true at all. Qwen 27B is marginally faster on a nearly empty context, then falls behind as context length increases due to the different attention mechanisms. Prefill for Qwen is much faster, but you're still comparing vastly different model sizes and capabilities. DeepSeek Flash is the best deal overall.

> completely fit in a high-end consumer or mid-end pro GPU

Or you could fit the dense portion of a much more capable model and still take advantage of that hardware.

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

#370

Post by Pxtl »

derefr wrote: post #158
Pxtl wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exi…

Things that are tedious but simple but I'm unfamiliar with.

"Go add a gh action to compile and deploy this thing and run its tests" is one I've found it's good at. Yes I know how to make a gh pipeline but it's always a hassle to remember what goes where.

Cranking out unit tests is okay. It's good at summarizing things so it's not half bad at writing jsdoc/xmldoc comments.

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