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Nvidia RTX Spark

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Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#301

Post by bijowo1676 »

h14h wrote: post #295
bigyabai wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM inference decode is heavily dependent on memory speed, not just having lots of memory. You can't say "X amount of ram" because the memory bandwidth on an M1 is 68.3 GB/s versus the 614 GB/s of an M5 Max, or a 4090's 1.01 TB/s over GDDR6X. This basically creates a bottleneck at the oldest/cheapest Apple Silicon machines, which are already crippled for context prefill.

Thanks for clarifying -- I was oversimplifying. But honestly, obsoleting a huge number of otherwise great Apple Silicon machines is something Apple would moment consider a major "pro" of building a compelling local AI stack. With how much speculation around the difficult time Apple has had getting people to upgrade from M1, I'm sure they'd jump at such an opportunity.

this might be a way for Apple to milk product revenue for many years.

- Please buy our new Macbook pro M5 that gives you 20 tokens/s on local 80B LLM

next year - Please buy our new Macbook pro M6 that gives you 25 tokens/s on local 80B LLM

milking product revenue in perpetuity by offering meaningful marginal improvements, while keeping same architecture will be the golden goose for Apple

+plus if it allows to segment market by wallet size into poor/middle/rich classes, thats even better

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#302

Post by hdgvhicv »

smrtinsert wrote: post #287
thewebguyd wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local AI was/is bound to happen, eventually. It'd be smart of Nvidia to get ahead of it. Non-techy consumers may never do it, but at some point businesses are going to start asking when do they stop paying per token and start running models themselves. Right now the hardware is cost prohibitive, but I doubt that'll always be the case. Eventually the hardware will get cheaper and more available, and Nvidia seems to be…

> Non-techy consumers may never do it They will. As some point in the future, people will want everything, they'll prompt full movies because they're bored and want to watch something.

You’re assuming that owning compute will be possible.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#303

Post by [deleted] »

bigyabai wrote: post #284
h14h wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can only hope. That said, Apple's vertical integration is a massive competitive advantage here, IMO. Nvidia's reliance on Microsoft & Windows for software support likely makes competing w/ Apple an uphill battle. If/when Local AI gets good enough to compete with Cloud AI on most inference workloads, Apple starts to look like Nvidia's biggest competitor. While this is admittedly a dream scenario, the biggest downs…

I don't understand this stance. Microsoft is reliant on Nvidia, they don't have a good ARM SOC to ship with without them. They will bend over backwards to accommodate these SOCs on Windows, and probably don't have much work to do in the first place. Apple's vertical integration has led to a Siri overhaul that took half a decade to roll out, and it won't even run locally. They built an NPU coprocessor that's basically…

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#304

Post by m463 »

a1o wrote: post #81
PeterStuer wrote: post #66

It's been almost 30 years, and a single letter changed. When will we get the Sparkstation, the UltraSpark and the SuperSpark?

SuperSpark and then UltraSpark. And then we can get SparkCube, Sparkii, and SparkiiU.

you forgot Xerox sPARC with guis, ethernet, laser printers, ...

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#305

Post by porphyra »

Lots of comments are expressing skepticism about compatibility but it's pretty cool how Nvidia has the clout to convince a bunch of game publishers and creative apps to release Arm versions. Popular games like League of Legends as well as stuff like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere are getting native Arm ports.

> Over 100 Windows software providers such as Adobe, Blackmagic Design, Blender, CapCut, ComfyUI and OTOY, and game developers such as KRAFTON, NetEase, Remedy Entertainment, Riot Games and XBOX are embracing the new RTX Spark platform. [...] NVIDIA is partnering with Adobe to rearchitect Adobe Premiere and Photoshop for RTX Spark. [0]

> Gaming on Arm is finally coming of age thanks to the NVIDIA partnership. Native anti-cheat solutions from Epic and BattlEye are fully supported on the RTX Spark platform. Major developers are jumping on board, with Riot Games bringing League of Legends and Valorant natively to the architecture, alongside KRAFTON bringing PUBG Battlegrounds. [1]

Also, Nintento Switch is an Nvidia/Arm gaming device so many game publishers already have some experience with the combo.

[0] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-microsoft-windows-...

[1] https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/01/microsoft-builds-it...

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#306

Post by browningstreet »

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.

They worked with Microsoft to make this commercially viable. That’s possibly reason enough.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#307

Post by siquick »

Tiberium wrote: post #50

For anyone curious to know how this will fare against Macbooks, at least in CPU perf: DGX Spark has the exact same GPU and CPU as the top RTX Spark laptops will, so you can just directly compare from that. Of course, DGX Spark is a miniPC, so laptops will likely be slower due to power limits/throttling.

DGX Spark is really poor at inference due to the memory bandwidth so hopefully they’ve fixed that before touting this as a way to run local models.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#308

Post by CuriouslyC »

thewebguyd wrote: post #246
airstrike wrote: post #211

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…

Local AI was/is bound to happen, eventually. It'd be smart of Nvidia to get ahead of it. Non-techy consumers may never do it, but at some point businesses are going to start asking when do they stop paying per token and start running models themselves. Right now the hardware is cost prohibitive, but I doubt that'll always be the case. Eventually the hardware will get cheaper and more available, and Nvidia seems to be…

I think non-techy users will get subsidized hardware with compute workloads running in the background on idle to recover the cost (and lots of ads).

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#309

Post by raggles »

BoggleOhYeah wrote: post #250

Kinda underwhelming. I was hoping to see that they improved their memory bandwidth to move toward competing with the M5 Max. But this is more akin to the Strix Halo.

128 GB memory is also lame. I'm hankering for a windows equivalent of the mac studio that came with 512 GB.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#310

Post by Shitty-kitty »

porphyra wrote: post #305

Lots of comments are expressing skepticism about compatibility but it's pretty cool how Nvidia has the clout to convince a bunch of game publishers and creative apps to release Arm versions. Popular games like League of Legends as well as stuff like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere are getting native Arm ports. > Over 100 Windows software providers such as Adobe, Blackmagic Design, Blender, CapCut, ComfyUI and OTOY, and…

Press releases are easy. Delivering on promises, not so much.
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