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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

#422

I do not see how it is a 'beast of a' anything. It has 300GB/s memory bandwidth, barely above AMD Strix halo (256GB/s) with the same 128GB RAM and less than half memory bandwidth of M5 Max 128GB (614GB/s). Emphasizing memory bandwidth because most people interested in it I suppose are AI enthusiasts. Also, Windows.

Unlike the M5 Max, it should have usable context prefill. It's feasible to run 256k token workflows that would take the better half of an hour for TTFT on the M5.

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

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no now I have to worry about shaders row hammering my OS ram /s

You really do have to worry about that!

Isn't this how the Xbox 360 got hacked? Not necessarily rowhammer but other methods.. IIRC some shader code in King Kong was able to affect CPU execution or something like that.

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

#426

I do not see how it is a 'beast of a' anything. It has 300GB/s memory bandwidth, barely above AMD Strix halo (256GB/s) with the same 128GB RAM and less than half memory bandwidth of M5 Max 128GB (614GB/s). Emphasizing memory bandwidth because most people interested in it I suppose are AI enthusiasts. Also, Windows.

They have a lot of software groundwork ahead of them to make an ARM CPU viable for any kind of desktop use outside direct inference or training usage too. AMD has the advantage that their x86 machines run everything, Apple maintains the whole MacOS stack, while Nvidia can barely scrape together one Ubuntu release per Jetson generation, it's beyond embarrassing. Maybe they ought to put those agents they keep droning a…

> Nvidia can barely scrape together one Ubuntu release per Jetson generation

Why would they do more? It's an LTS distro, the Nvidia drivers are updated for as long as the hardware's compute capability is supported.

Nvidia's ARM drivers are updated constantly, and battle-tested as the backbone in hundreds of thousands of Grace ARM servers.

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

#427
post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every AMD APU since introduction of HSA did it, which is how AMD ended up doing SoCs for PS4, PS5, and Xbox

Ok, so which one of these contemporary or previous chipsets could compete with the M1 for inference? Perhaps I'm missing some major detail.

The M1 isnt particularly good at inference, so pretty much every major current competitor with a 256+ bit unified memory system is better: AMD Strix Halo, NVIDIA DGX Spark, possibly Intel Panther Lake

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

#428

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"

I will not be spending thousands in hardware to run the worlds most mediocre llms at meh speeds. Sorry. I know for llm bros they think every output made by an LLM is magic, like every NFT guy thought every NFT collection was game changing, but there's nothing useful you can do with llms and 128gb of RAM (and there never will be) unless you have llm psychosis. Who cares.

Nothing isn't quite right but you wouldn't be using it like the hosted ones. 128gb is more than enough to run models to index my files and photos, denoise photos / AI photo masking, magic eraser type tasks for images, frame generation for gaming, etc.

Even for a lot of LLM type tasks, 128gb is likely more than enough to control a lot of PC configuration and automation with natural language.

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

#429

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 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 Game dev here. For anyone reading this - it’s not because we’re lazy, it’s because _it’s really hard to do_. One of the biggest differences between the current generation consoles and the current gen PCs is unified memory.

What? It's incredibly easy to take full use of memory bandwidth. For example, put proper volumetric smoke/fire/explosion sim in your game. But game developers don't do that because they are lazy.

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

#430

I ran two gens of Jetson board and I have zero confidence in this. NVDA is printing in the data centre and everything else has no staying power.

I've ran two gens of Jetson, two gens of Nvidia/Linux dGPU and one gen of Tegra. The dGPUs have much better drivers than the devkit hardware does.
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