111–120 of 203 posts
Couldn't you buy a Mac Ultra with more memory for the same price?
This Asus box costs $3000, and the cheapest Mac Studio with the same amount of RAM costs $3500, or $3700 if you also match the SSD capacity. You do get about twice as much memory bandwidth out of the Mac though.
This is a tangent, but the little pop up example for their ai chat bot to try and entice me to use it was something along the lines of “what are the specs?” How great would it be if instead of shoving these bots to help decipher the marketing speak they just had the specs right up front?
But how would that boost their KPIs for user engagement and AI usage?
From the FAQ… doesn’t seem promising when they ask and then evade a crucial question. > What is the memory bandwidth supported by Ascent GX10? AI applications often require a bigger memory. With the NVIDIA Blackwell GPU that supports 128GB of unified memory, ASUS Ascent GX10 is an AI supercomputer that enables faster training, better real-time inference, and support larger models like LLMs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Better support than MPS and nothing Apple is shipping today can compete with even the high end consumer CUDA devices in actual speed.
Presumably the second point is irrelevant if you're choosing among devices with unified memory.
The Spark's GPU gets ~4x the FP16 compute performance of an M3 Ultra GPU on less than half the Mac Studio's total TDP.
Seems this is basically DGX Spark with 1TB of disk so about $1000 bucks cheaper. DGX Spark has not been received well (at least online, Carmack saying it runs at half the spec, low memory bandwidth etc.) so perhaps this is way to reduce buyers regret, you are out only $3000 and not $4000 (with DGX Spark).
Simon Willison seems to like his: https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/codex-spark-gpt-oss
"Nvidia dgx os", ugh. It would be a lot more enticing if that thing could run stock Linux.
It's just Ubuntu with precanned Nvidia software, otherwise it's a "normal" UEFI + ACPI booting machine, just like any x86 desktop. People have already installed NixOS and Fedora 43, and you can even go ahead and then install CUDA and it will work, too. (You might be able to forgo the nvidia modules and run upstream Mesa+NVK, even.) It's very different from Jetson and much more like a normal x86 desktop. The kernel is…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Made the correction to 80Gb/sec thank you. W.r.t ip, the fastest I’m aware of is 25Gb/s via TB5 adapters like from Sonnet.
You should not be using an adapter to get IP over Thunderbolt. Just connect a Thunderbolt5 cable to both machines.
The Asus clustering speed is not limited to p2p.
Seems this is basically DGX Spark with 1TB of disk so about $1000 bucks cheaper. DGX Spark has not been received well (at least online, Carmack saying it runs at half the spec, low memory bandwidth etc.) so perhaps this is way to reduce buyers regret, you are out only $3000 and not $4000 (with DGX Spark).
Simon Willison seems to like his: https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/codex-spark-gpt-oss
Should you get one? #
It’s a bit too early for me to provide a confident recommendation concerning this machine. As indicated above, I’ve had a tough time figuring out how best to put it to use, largely through my own inexperience with CUDA, ARM64 and Ubuntu GPU machines in general.
The ecosystem improvements in just the past 24 hours have been very reassuring though. I expect it will be clear within a few weeks how well supported this machine is going to be.GX10 vs MacBook Pro M4 Max: - Price: $3k / $5k - Memory: same (128GB) - Memory bandwidth: ~273GB/s / 546GB/sec - SSD: same (1 TB) - GPU advantage: ~5x-10x depending on memory bottleneck - Network: same 10Gbe (via TB) - Direct cluster: 200Gb / 80Gb - Portable: No / Yes - Free Mac included: No / Yes - Free monitor: No / Yes - Linux out of the box: Yes / No - CUDA Dev environment: Yes : No
For homelab use, this is the only thing that matters to me.
Also, NVIDIA's software they have you install on another machine to use it is garbage. They tried to make it sort of appliance-y but most people would rather just have SSH work out of the box and can go from there. IMO just totally unnecessary. The software aspect was what put me over the edge.
Maybe the gen 2 will be better, but unless you have a really specific use case that this solves well, buy credits or something somewhere else.