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Asus Ascent GX10

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Re: Asus Ascent GX10

#201
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mediatek is in the picture because NVIDIA outsourced everything in GB10 but the GPU to Mediatek. GB10 is two chiplets, and the larger one is from Mediatek. Yes, Mediatek uses off the shelf ARM CPU core IP, but they still had to make a lot of decisions about how to implement it: how many cores, what cluster and cache arrangements, none of which resemble NVIDIA's Grace CPU.

Thanks for the clarification. I was surprised to learn it is not a single chip; thought they did something akin to Apple Silicon integrating some ARM cores on their main chip. Kind of disappointing: they basically asked MediaTek to build a CPU with an NV-Link I/O.

The big picture is probably that GB10 is destined to show up in laptops, but NVIDIA couldn't be bothered to do all the boring work of building the rest of the SoC and Mediatek was the cheapest and easiest partner available. It'll eventually be followed by an Intel SoC with NVIDIA providing the GPU chiplet, but in the meantime the Mediatek CPU solution is good enough.

From NVIDIA's perspective, they need an answer to the growing segment of SoCs with decent sized GPUs and unified memory; their existing solutions at the far end of a PCIe link with a small pool of their own memory just can't work for some important use cases, and providing GPU chiplets to be integrated into other SoCs is how they avoid losing ground in these markets without the expense of building their own full consumer hardware platform and going to war with all of Apple, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm.

Re: Asus Ascent GX10

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taiwanese companies are legendary for producing baller hardware with terrible marketing and documentation that answers important questions. It's like those teams don't talk to each other inside the business. Fortunately, their products are also easy to crack open and probe.

Also terrible software and firmware. Examples are the programs for motherboard RGB control from Asus, Asrock, MSI, Gigabyte, etc.

This is a very specific example of something the big BIOS players just don't give a crap about supporting well, either.

It's a feature that requires two different _companies_ to collaborate to build. Mayhem.

Re: Asus Ascent GX10

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running LLMs will be slow and training them is basically out of the question. You can get a Framework Desktop with similar bandwidth for less than a third of the price of this thing (though that isn't NVIDIA).

> Running LLMs will be slow and training them is basically out of the question I think it's the reverse, the use case for these boxes are basically training and fine-tuning, not inference.

The use case for these boxes is a local NVIDIA development platform before you do your actual training run on your A100 cluster.
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