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Nvidia RTX Spark

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Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#271

Post by thewebguyd »

pjmlp wrote: post #257
drakythe wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve did that little more than a decade ago, the original Steam Machines. It didn't take, and despite the success of the Deck and current techy trends, Linux does not have the % to make the ROI worthwhile if it isn't simple for developers. Proton is a wedge in the door that will help Linux get there.

It is simple, Android NDK has all the same APIs for 3D rendering and audio, as do all major middleware engines. The failure of business, only reinforces Windows as the platform most studios reach for. Buy Windows, buy Visual Studio, pay game engines licenses, let Valve do the work. This ignoring that current Valve's management doesn't live forever, so who knows what happens afterwards.

A potential change in Valve's culture/management aside, "let valve do the work" is a feature, not a bug. Studio spends all their budget targeting one platform (which still has ~90+% of the PC gaming market), and get Linux support for free.

Windows' monopoly on game dev isn't just market share either, since game dev isn't just code. You still need Photoshop, Maya, etc. and in smaller studies there's typically a crossover where some devs are doing art as well. Visual Studio's C++ debugger is still one of the best, and the tooling elsewhere hasn't caught up yet (compared to DX + PIX).

Then you also have to solve distribution and handling the fragmented display & audio stack. It's gotten a lot better, but its still a factor.

I'm fine with most of the work going into Wine/Proton. A stable ABI for Linux is a boon, if it happens to be Win32 then so be it.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#272

Post by shmerl »

tarruda wrote: post #197
giancarlostoro wrote: post #186

Can it work with Linux? That's all I care about.

I don't think there's any incentive for Nvidia to make this a Windows-only device, so most likely it will be fully supported on Linux, just like their GPUs are.

I wouldn't trust it to have good upstream support. It's Nvidia. So not really interested.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#273

Post by thewebguyd »

adamrezich wrote: post #266
h14h wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it's only a matter of time before "self-hosting local AI" is as complicated as installing an app and clicking a download button. And when that happens, the pitch to non-techy users is "Free ChatGPT you can use offline with zero privacy risk". Once hardware accessibility and LLM efficiency advance to the point that this becomes feasible, I suspect it'll result in a much bigger hit to the cloud AI market than many…

Why is it only a matter of time? The AI-as-a-service companies are going to continue to improve their products by improving both the part that could be reproduced in a self-hosted setup, but also the “secret sauce” they put on top of that to make it a better product. There is no incentive for this “secret sauce” to be something that can be reproduced for self-hosting, is there?

What secret sauce? We already have open source tooling for tool use, web browsing, and code execution/computer use. Open weight models will win in the end.

AIaaS might keep an edge with multi-modal agentic workflows, but for 80% of general use cases, no "secret sauce" needed, the open weight models are already there, and tooling is constantly getting better.

The bottleneck is the cost of local hardware right now.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#274

Post by fidotron »

pjmlp wrote: post #257
drakythe wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve did that little more than a decade ago, the original Steam Machines. It didn't take, and despite the success of the Deck and current techy trends, Linux does not have the % to make the ROI worthwhile if it isn't simple for developers. Proton is a wedge in the door that will help Linux get there.

It is simple, Android NDK has all the same APIs for 3D rendering and audio, as do all major middleware engines. The failure of business, only reinforces Windows as the platform most studios reach for. Buy Windows, buy Visual Studio, pay game engines licenses, let Valve do the work. This ignoring that current Valve's management doesn't live forever, so who knows what happens afterwards.

At this point Valve look more capable of running a platform business than Microsoft do.

Microsoft have spent the whole Nadella era in "oooo cloud" inspired wonder and actively screwed up everything else.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#275

Post by HerbManic »

Matl wrote: post #210
tarruda wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's any incentive for Nvidia to make this a Windows-only device, so most likely it will be fully supported on Linux, just like their GPUs are.

> just like their GPUs are So with proprietary blobs that give you more trouble that they're worth?

Depends. It is the typical Nvidia problem. Everything is a black box but when it all works it is the best option available. But when it breaks, you hate them with a passion.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#276

Post by fidotron »

pjmlp wrote: post #255
t-writescode wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it runs faster than the windows ones, who cares?

The game developers that use Windows, with Visual Studio, to develop such games.

This is, admittedly, the great anomaly.

In truth if AMD or nVidia put their mind to having decent profiling tooling on Linux, and the AI wave suggests they will have no option, then this could readily become a thing.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#277

Post by Npovview »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #245
cultofmetatron wrote: post #242

can these do training or only inference? currently working on learning machine learning and I'd love to have a physical machine I could aim to build real workloads on in a few years.

They're Turing complete. What else do you need?

There is a reason why Google has tpu8i and tpu8t

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#278

Post by HerbManic »

fidotron wrote: post #202
2001zhaozhao wrote: post #159

I think this is the first time an ARM windows device gets marketed for gaming. Would be interesting to see what kind of performance hit games have on the x86 to ARM translation layer.

Rosetta on Mac was obviously impressive. There was also impressive Arm->Intel translation in the mobile ecosystem at one time. One reason it works surprisingly well on modern systems is how much is offloaded to the GPU. You aren't going to get great power optimization or anything without it being truly native though. There are games which are CPU limited though, and it will be interesting how those do. Curiously thos…

There was a presentation from Valve about their Dex compatibility layer. They did something that seems so obvious in retrospect.

When you lay out the software stack it is essentially OS > Game code > APIs. Both the OS and APIs are native code, it is only that middle point that needs the real work.

This is why x86 to ARM doesn't have such a heavy performance cost. So games can be CPU heavy but if it is heavy at the API end, that isnt a huge issue.

Very cool.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#279

Post by h14h »

adamrezich wrote: post #266
h14h wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it's only a matter of time before "self-hosting local AI" is as complicated as installing an app and clicking a download button. And when that happens, the pitch to non-techy users is "Free ChatGPT you can use offline with zero privacy risk". Once hardware accessibility and LLM efficiency advance to the point that this becomes feasible, I suspect it'll result in a much bigger hit to the cloud AI market than many…

Why is it only a matter of time? The AI-as-a-service companies are going to continue to improve their products by improving both the part that could be reproduced in a self-hosted setup, but also the “secret sauce” they put on top of that to make it a better product. There is no incentive for this “secret sauce” to be something that can be reproduced for self-hosting, is there?

I think a major incentive could be to sell hardware. If Apple is able to get their hands on a local LLM capable of covering a significant % of what people use ChatGPT for, the pitch they can offer is:

"Free, private, offline ChatGPT so long as your laptop has X GB of RAM"

Beyond that, I wouldn't underestimate the incentive of "because I can". The "secret sauce" you refer to is effectively just a DB & a while loop that feeds text to a bunch of tensors. If an indie dev decides they want to release something that dismantles the OpenAI & Anthropic moats, there really isn't all that big of a technical barrier stopping them.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#280

Post by jwlake »

hs86 wrote: post #67

I am wary of those ARM-based Windows machines because I am unsure how good the ongoing driver support for those SoCs will be. Will they even outlive the Windows version they currently ship with? Looking at devices like the NVIDIA Shield gives me some hope that NVIDIA will be better than Qualcomm here. I just hope this is not a case where the OEM has to purchase X years of driver support from the chip vendor beforehan…

I would love a RTX Spark Shield. ;p
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