231–240 of 437 posts
Can it work with Linux? That's all I care about.
Honestly this looks like Microsoft must have thrown a pile of money at them to not mention it, as it's just too obviously the main question. No one seriously cares about this running Windows. We want Steam and CUDA/Ollama, and Windows just gets in the way. nVidia are simply not that oblivious, but I have to admit in their position I'd have considered the Microsoft involvement more trouble than it's worth, which is am…
This may finally be the chip family ARM on Windows has always needed. Qualcomm's chips have always been dogs with slow off-the-shelf ARM CPU cores that have pathetic single-threaded performance compared to x86 AMD/Intel or ARM Apple Silicon designs.
Geekbench Single Thread Score:
- DGX Spark (same CPU as RTX Spark): 3125
- Snapdragon X1 Elite: 2950
- Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme: 4050
- AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX: 3225
- Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus: 3175
- Apple M5 Max: 4350
I'm happy to be wrong about Qualcomm's latest X2 chip performance, even if it is shipping in only a single product so far. Their previous best was the lowest in this list.
This seems to be an attempt to compete with people running local models on Apple hardware—even though those local Mac Mini setups aren't really powerful. I expect we'll get there in a few years, so perhaps this is Nvidia taking an early step in that direction. In that case, this goes against Anthropic and OpenAI's business models. Which is a double whammy after Jensen Huang's recent comment about how agentic coding w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Battery life
The comment I'm replying to appears to be talking about power DELIVERY, not consumption. Why would extra power-delivery capacity be intolerable?
Although I'm kinda surprised the DGX Spark used USB-C at all for power instead of just like a DC jack or whatever. But whatever.
I didn't see this in the article but elsewhere I've seen the memory bandwidth quoted as 600GB/s [1]. For comparison: - 5090/6000 Pro: 1792GB/s - 5080:: 960GB/s - 5070Ti: 892GB/s - M3 Ultra: 819GB/s - DGX Spark: 273GB/s (less than an M5 Pro at 307GB/s) Memory bandwidth isn't everything but it will cap inference rate pretty heavily. Also, the M3 Ultra is for an almost 2 year old Mac Studio. It's widely expected that it…
This is much better value than 5090, you can run much bigger models.
After nvidia's many years of neglecting Linux, paired with direct Microsoft's involvement? Are we going to trust them, to allow installing Linux in these easily? I don't think so. This most likely be a winmodem situation, again
DGX Spark has the same soc and ships with Ubuntu
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trend over the past three decades of personal computing has been for devices to become exponentially more powerful regardless of the actual computing needs of users. The excess computing power has famously been requested by projects such as SETI@Home and Folding@Home, and been exploited by bad actors for crypto mining. The most basic laptop today used only for web browsing and word processing would be a powerful…
most crypto mining has moved to specialists, even where there were deliberate attempts to make it ASIC-resistant SETI@Home is a very niche use case and web browsing still happens by connecting to data centers and server farms, not by connecting to another laptop
ARM64+GPU sure seems like the future. I'm still using my M1 and even that can handle models well, has decent graphics, M5 is a beast, and M6 must surely go even bigger on LLM compute. Now Microsoft has a compelling ARM64+GPU future too. What does AMD or Intel have here?
I think the future will be 50/50 x64 vs arm64 for PCs.