Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver
daniel.lawrence.lu
Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver
1–10 of 85 posts
Re: Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver
#2Super-powerful (if rather pricy) Linux desktop that happens to play games while doing everything else... that man is living my dream :'D
Re: Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver
#3It's interesting how many of these issues don't appear to be specific to the DGX Spark but to the standard "Nvidia GPUs suck on Linux" type of issues that afflict a lot of people.
Re: Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver
#4I strongly considered it, but the one thing that scares me away from wanting to do the spark is you basically have to use nvidia's linux (from what I've read) and it doesn't appear the nvidia is interested in upstreaming their kernel changes.
I'm avoiding where possible buying electronics where support is controlled by the manufacturer and not me.
Re: Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver
#5It's interesting how many of these issues don't appear to be specific to the DGX Spark but to the standard "Nvidia GPUs suck on Linux" type of issues that afflict a lot of people.
it's actually very stable on x86_64 these days, even with optimus.
Re: Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver
#6I strongly considered it, but the one thing that scares me away from wanting to do the spark is you basically have to use nvidia's linux (from what I've read) and it doesn't appear the nvidia is interested in upstreaming their kernel changes. I'm avoiding where possible buying electronics where support is controlled by the manufacturer and not me.
A good instinct. There are a lot of things a $500 AMD GPU can do in linux that a $5000 DGX cannot.
Re: Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver
#7I strongly considered it, but the one thing that scares me away from wanting to do the spark is you basically have to use nvidia's linux (from what I've read) and it doesn't appear the nvidia is interested in upstreaming their kernel changes. I'm avoiding where possible buying electronics where support is controlled by the manufacturer and not me.
If I understand your comment correctly, I think he addresses that in the first few paragraphs:
> The DGX Spark runs “DGX OS” but it is in fact just plain old Ubuntu 24.04 with some additions. If you want, you can just install another Linux distribution easily (Fedora works well), although there may be a couple of weird bugs with the Realtek Ethernet driver so the NVIDIA version of the Linux kernel has a couple of patches. Unlike some other ARM devices, the DGX Spark is all ACPI rather than device tree based, so regular Linux builds for arm64 work just fine.
Re: Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver
#8I strongly considered it, but the one thing that scares me away from wanting to do the spark is you basically have to use nvidia's linux (from what I've read) and it doesn't appear the nvidia is interested in upstreaming their kernel changes. I'm avoiding where possible buying electronics where support is controlled by the manufacturer and not me.
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Re: Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver
#9I'm genuinely disappointed with my Spark. I don't know how anyone can claim it performs decently with LLMs or diffusion models. Back when I worked in VFX in the early 2000s, we had a saying: "Render time is coffee time" and if you try to run this thing with a usable context size, you'll be drinking a lot of coffee. Most of the optimizations it relies on for inference simply aren't available for training, so it crawls like a snail on almost every model. An RTX 6000 Blackwell would have been the better investment for an AI enthusiasts and for general computing there are cheaper offerings.
Re: Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver
#10I'm genuinely disappointed with my Spark. I don't know how anyone can claim it performs decently with LLMs or diffusion models. Back when I worked in VFX in the early 2000s, we had a saying: "Render time is coffee time" and if you try to run this thing with a usable context size, you'll be drinking a lot of coffee. Most of the optimizations it relies on for inference simply aren't available for training, so it crawls…
If you bought it for inference you made a mistake. They aren't good at that. Use it to train models and experiment with ML. It's much better at that.
If you just want local inference buy a Mac.
If you bought early on, like I did, the Spark is probably worth double what you payed now. I think I paid $3,000 retail for mine and the last time I looked they were fetching close to $6k on ebay. I'm not sure if that's still the case, but you can buy a very nice Mac with $6k.