Nvidia RTX Spark • Hacker News Board

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#381

Post by BatteryMountain » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 6:08 AM UTC

hootz wrote: post #346

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…

Will this push even more games into Linux?

Well, linux already runs perfectly fine on ARM chips, so it probably won't matter much. The real bottleneck is getting game studios to build arm releases of their code, which by itself is easy in normal circumstances but they often have third party code that doesn't have ports or are abandoned or hidden behind NDA's (networking code, sound processing, custom tooling etc). So ARM and Linux are not the blocking factor at all and I'm willing to bet most of the engineers working on game engines have ported them to linux/arm for fun already, they just can't release for various reasons above.

So if anything, we need to push more game studios to use open source dependencies which will make porting easier.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#382

Post by SeriousM » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 6:23 AM UTC

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #363

eVeechu7 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is GHCP in this context? Glasgow Haskell Compiler Platform? Google Hostage Computer Program?

GitHub Copilot. It was one of the best values around in terms of cheap LLM access since each prompt was basically 4 cents (more or less), no matter how much it would do or how many tokens it used. A simple "Proceed" prompt that was telling the agent to execute a sophisticated plan could burn a lot of time without needing any direct intervention by the user, but as of June 1st, they switched to metered billing, meanin…

And when you had a tool call that asked the user for the next step, you could easily run a whole day with 4c. Guess how the people did 5k $ worth of token with 100$ spent.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#383

Post by easygenes » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 6:25 AM UTC

Looks like RTX Spark desktop is the DGX Spark desktop, minus the expensive 200GbE Connect-X NIC. Only since the DGX Spark released, memory and nand prices have jumped, so it will likely retail for the same amount as the DGX Spark did on release (which has since gone up significantly).

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#384

Post by easygenes » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 6:31 AM UTC

eigenspace wrote: post #83

I'm surprised they released this thing. Brand perception is probably a lot more important to Nvidia than whatever sales they could get from this thing, and if it's basically just DGX Spark, it's likely to underwhelm. I've heard there's still a large backlog of both software problems, and hardware problems with the platform. The software problems could be fixed with time, but they'll still give a shitty first impressi…

Speaking as someone who has had a DGX Spark all year and been active developing at the driver and kernel level for it and other ARM64 Linux devices the last couple of years, it's not bad now and certainly doesn't have any issues that I wouldn't expect to be fully fixed with the second-gen motherboards going into these. The main hardware issues are not with the core SoC. They're replaceable edge peripherals like the PD PMIC.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#385

Post by kramadeshak » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 6:32 AM UTC

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #341

I added an R9700 32GB to my 10+ year old desktop that had a 980 4GB card in it, for a grand total of $1350 or so. The payoff compared to what I was using with GHCP was 33 months, but when GHCP announced their price increase, it basically became a 3 month payoff at minimum (so yes, GHCP did a 10x price increase for non-parallel agentic workflows) I can easily run Qwen3.6 35B-A3B with Q5_K_M with a 260k+ context window…

Can you give some context of how you are getting both of those to work? I am guessing vulkan. Did you face any pain during integration? I am planning to add R9700 to my 5070ti and my only concern is if vulkan wouldn't be able to do the heavy lifiting.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#386

Post by gargan » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 6:34 AM UTC

BatteryMountain wrote: post #381

hootz wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will this push even more games into Linux?

Well, linux already runs perfectly fine on ARM chips, so it probably won't matter much. The real bottleneck is getting game studios to build arm releases of their code, which by itself is easy in normal circumstances but they often have third party code that doesn't have ports or are abandoned or hidden behind NDA's (networking code, sound processing, custom tooling etc). So ARM and Linux are not the blocking factor…

Linux is terrible on ARM, I don't agree that it runs perfectly fine at all. Try loading Ubuntu onto a Snapdragon laptop for example. It works but lots of issues eg sound, webcam quality, etc

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#387

Post by Schlagbohrer » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 6:39 AM UTC

They show premium skinny laptops which will have this. I wonder how much the lack of heat dissipation capability will limit it's compute capabilities?

In university a friend of mine had a large hardcover book she kept in her dorm freezer. I asked here WTF she had a big book in there. She said it was for minecraft - she'd place her laptop on top of it while playing. The book was cold but also quite dry. I wonder how well it worked.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#388

Post by tommica » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 6:49 AM UTC

Wow, specs seem amazing. So want one of those once you can run linux on it, especially for the ability to run local models on a laptop.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#389

Post by msh » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 6:50 AM UTC

brailsafe wrote: post #230

rickdeckard wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's surely one thing, Apple went all-in on ARM, for Microsoft it's still a kinda "reduced experience". But the bigger problem in my opinion: How much of the Windows userbase actually sticks to Windows because of its backwards-compatibility? --> What would happen if they break this model and the OS is only judged based on its user experience and available applications...? I'm not sure it would stand any chance to c…

> MacOS on the other hand is full of ecosystem features, improving collaboration, connectivity, handoff across devices, etc. True, but if you're only in the ecosystem as a mac user, in many ways it's felt like a mixed bag. I still wildly prefer mac over other operating systems, but if upgrades had a price, I think those sales would mostly go to iPhone users. Even at free, I'm yet to find a compelling reason to instal…

For me this feature is worth upgrading over: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/you-can-finally-manag...

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#390

Post by bananadonkey » Tue, Jun 02, 2026, 7:03 AM UTC

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #387

They show premium skinny laptops which will have this. I wonder how much the lack of heat dissipation capability will limit it's compute capabilities? In university a friend of mine had a large hardcover book she kept in her dorm freezer. I asked here WTF she had a big book in there. She said it was for minecraft - she'd place her laptop on top of it while playing. The book was cold but also quite dry. I wonder how w…

I had a high end spec gaming laptop with 0 airflow back in the 2000s, and used to raid dorm LAN party freezers for frozen meat + towel = heatsink.

I was lucky that iteration 1 (sans towel) didn't ruin the laptop...