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AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

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141–150 of 274 posts

Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Waiting for the market to be less insane is somewhat akin to waiting for the s&p500 to drop a decent amount so you can buy in. lol this is so wrong it's funny - equities go up in price, commodity goods go down in price. the two markets are literally diametrically opposed.

I'd have a better portfolio right now if I invested in RAM instead of equities.

RAM is more like agricultural products (with short shelf-life) than commodities like fossil fuels, mineral ores, etc. You can manage an inventory or speculate on production, but you cannot really hold a "portfolio" of it in any sensible way.

So, you should get into RAM futures if you believe this is more than a transient arbitrage sort of situation. All extant RAM will become obsolete as the demand shifts to newer, fancier versions.

Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I bought Framework Desktop in November 2025 with almost these exact specs for ~$2.5k

Same spec Framework costs $4k+ today, this is actually cheaper (albeit not as upgradable as framework).

Framework, weirdly, overcharges considerably for their SSDs. You can currently get a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB on Amazon for $390; Framework charges $625 for the Sandisk 850x 2TB, which has similar performance (and is being sold on Amazon for $530).

If you DIY your own SSD, you can spec a Framework Desktop for below $4k; but not much below. Roughly the same price.

Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have a better portfolio right now if I invested in RAM instead of equities.

RAM is more like agricultural products (with short shelf-life) than commodities like fossil fuels, mineral ores, etc. You can manage an inventory or speculate on production, but you cannot really hold a "portfolio" of it in any sensible way. So, you should get into RAM futures if you believe this is more than a transient arbitrage sort of situation. All extant RAM will become obsolete as the demand shifts to newer, f…

>but you cannot really hold a "portfolio" of it in any sensible way.

xAI effectively did and lucked out to cover their losses and more with it.

Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

#145
post #24

These devices were great when they were cheaper than the DGX Spark. But when they cost the same price (unless the Spark has shot up too), there's no reason to buy this over a Spark. The Spark is literally a faster version of this, with better software support. Edit: And I say that as an owner of a Ryzen AI Max 395 device.

Cheapest I've been able to get a DGX Spark FE is now around $4700 just FYI. This is from multiple vendors in higher-ed.

Microcenter has them marked at $4500 right now (that's with the 4TB SSD) [1]. I suspect it comes down to what you're using it for; if you're looking for a general purpose computer that's also solid at AI, the AMD machine is better. But if you want the best possible AI machine at below $5k... actually you should probably just buy an RTX 3090 or 5090. But if the 128gb of memory is critical, then yeah DGX Spark is it.

[1] https://www.microcenter.com/product/699008/nvidia-dgx-spark

Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

#146

I have a Strix Halo device, and like it, but at this price, might as well buy the Nvidia-based ASUS GX 10, if you're buying it for AI. CUDA remains the stronger ecosystem. The AMD is a better desktop machine, as it has a better CPU, but the Nvidia will be a little faster and a little better supported for inference and training workloads. You can almost always do the same things with ROCm, but you're going to work a l…

I ... don't find the Ubuntu on my Spark to be dogshit? It's ... fine? It's just Ubuntu. Hasn't given me any grief and it's so far the only vendor I've seen that actually ships a properly supported Linux on an ARM64 device for Linux, so there's that. I use my ASUS GX10 as my daily driver, my primary workstation. Only thing that doesn't work for me on it is Spotify (probably some DRM thing). Oh, and there's no Signal ARM64 client, it seems.

The big advantage of the DGX Spark over the Strix Halo is much faster prefill. Like 5x the speed. Also the networking hardware on it is insanely powerful, though I and 99% of other Spark users, are unlikely to use it to its full capacity.

Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

#147
post #51

I really want a 128gb+ machine but it's brutal to be at only 256 GB/s for $4k (especially with the drawbacks of both ARM and AMD). I fear that by the time the RTX Spark comes out it'd have to be $6k, and by the time a 128gb or more machine with 700+ GB/s comes out it'd be at $10k, way out of most consumers' hands. Edit: capitalized gb/s to GB/s.

Yeah, folks should be aware that if you're filling up the memory on a Strix Halo for an inference workload, you're going to be getting uncomfortably slow token rates. Like, DS4 (a 1-bit quantization of DeepSeek V4 Flash) runs at something like 9-13 tokens/second, with a loooong time to first token. It is not a realistic interactive coding model for agentic use.

I like my Strix Halo and keep it chewing on stuff, mostly non-interactive workloads (security audits of software mostly, training experiments, etc.), I get a lot of use out of it. If you want to experiment with AI, it is a good platform for that, though at $4k you can get an Nvidia-based Asus Ascend GX10, which is probably better. But, if you want a local model for interactive agentic use, you're going to be running either Qwen 3.6 or Gemma 4, which will fit comfortably on 2x64GB GPUs (even old GPUs will run them faster than the Strix Halo...I have dual Radeon Pro V620s which are faster, and they're six years old), or snugly on 32GB. A 48GB or 64GB Mac would run them well. Two Radeon AI Pro R9700 GPUs is probably the sweet spot, right now for GPUs. Not the cost of a good used car, like a 5090 or 4090, but plenty of memory and performance for local inference. Also, not finicky and weird and needing custom 3D printed fan shrouds like the old server GPUs on eBay.

At the moment, there just isn't a model that works better on a 128GB inference machine like this that don't also work fine on 64GB machines, which may be faster (very few 32GB GPUs will be slower, though I wouldn't recommend buying any GPU that isn't currently actively supported by the vendor drivers and CUDA or ROCm...so probably don't buy an MI50 or V100 or whatever).

Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

#148

In case it saves anyone some time (from the article): "The AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395(Strix Halo) processor has been available since Spring 2025 and the Halo doesn’t offer anything new on that front." It has the same 256 GB/s memory bandwidth limit as every board previously, not sure why this is even being released right now as if it's some new fangled thing - you can go get a Framework Desktop for roughly the same price…

This. I bought Framework Desktop in November 2025 with almost these exact specs for ~$2.5k

I got the EVO-X2 for $1,599! In 44+ years of buying computers, I've seen some appreciation, but nothing like this. Going from $1,599 to ~$3,500 in a year is just insane.

Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

#149

These devices were great when they were cheaper than the DGX Spark. But when they cost the same price (unless the Spark has shot up too), there's no reason to buy this over a Spark. The Spark is literally a faster version of this, with better software support. Edit: And I say that as an owner of a Ryzen AI Max 395 device.

Depends on what you use it for. The CPU of Ryzen is better than that of DGX Spark, especially for modern programs that have been updated to use AVX-512 (i.e. it has a significantly higher multithreaded performance). Only for GPU applications the NVIDIA system is likely to be better.

For inference, the prefill on the DGX Spark is like 5x the speed. Decode about the same (both bandwidth limited to about the same memory speed, unfortunately).

Difference is on the Spark you can use and learn CUDA, vLLM, SGlang etc which is the industry standard.

I bought mine (ASUS version) back in December with the intent to learn that stack of stuff. I've been on and off with it but it seems to have paid off, looks like I might be getting work in the inference serving space.

Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

#150
post #24

These devices were great when they were cheaper than the DGX Spark. But when they cost the same price (unless the Spark has shot up too), there's no reason to buy this over a Spark. The Spark is literally a faster version of this, with better software support. Edit: And I say that as an owner of a Ryzen AI Max 395 device.

Cheapest I've been able to get a DGX Spark FE is now around $4700 just FYI. This is from multiple vendors in higher-ed.

I can't wait for the memory price crisis to end so these things drop in price so I can get a second one.
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