This will crush the M5 Max going by the numbers. I'm curious to see how much they end up costing
Nvidia RTX Spark
41–50 of 437 posts
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#42It all sounds good on paper. But I have trouble believing Windows can be a good platform for this. Microsoft has lost all trust after inserting ads into windows, slowly removing power user features, and exploiting every dark pattern they can. And for years, the ARM based Windows laptops have been useless due to app compatibility issues. Why would this change now? Is it priced to be a lot cheaper than Apple’s laptops?…
Hopefully MSFT would look at this as a do or die system, and go all in on improving the user and ownership experience. Will they? Not so sure.
Microsoft sees windows purely as a platform to sell AI products these days.
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#43It all sounds good on paper. But I have trouble believing Windows can be a good platform for this. Microsoft has lost all trust after inserting ads into windows, slowly removing power user features, and exploiting every dark pattern they can. And for years, the ARM based Windows laptops have been useless due to app compatibility issues. Why would this change now? Is it priced to be a lot cheaper than Apple’s laptops?…
Anecdotally Windows ARM works fine for me, although to be honest most of my work is command line + browser anyway. WSL works like a treat. Steam installs and most lower end games also play fine on my ARM laptop too. Games that require kernel anticheat don't work.
I think they make a great "second device" where you have something meatier to fall back to if something doesn't quite work right. I'm not sure if it's ready to take on the "main device" role just yet. But it's a far far better experience than the Surface RT days.
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#44This 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.
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#45This will crush the M5 Max going by the numbers. I'm curious to see how much they end up costing
M5 max is 3x stronger and 50% more power efficient. nice try though.
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#46It all sounds good on paper. But I have trouble believing Windows can be a good platform for this. Microsoft has lost all trust after inserting ads into windows, slowly removing power user features, and exploiting every dark pattern they can. And for years, the ARM based Windows laptops have been useless due to app compatibility issues. Why would this change now? Is it priced to be a lot cheaper than Apple’s laptops?…
Who cares about Windows, the goal is to run local AI models similar to AMD Strix Halo and Apple Silicon machines. The OS is honestly a distant last concern as long as the models work well, as you could put Linux on these too, but not sure how well wake lock works.
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#47It all sounds good on paper. But I have trouble believing Windows can be a good platform for this. Microsoft has lost all trust after inserting ads into windows, slowly removing power user features, and exploiting every dark pattern they can. And for years, the ARM based Windows laptops have been useless due to app compatibility issues. Why would this change now? Is it priced to be a lot cheaper than Apple’s laptops?…
The "gaming" take is a strange one indeed for an ARM platform. Hopefully they (Microsoft or Nvidia?) put some real effort into the translation layer. They claim modern AAA games, but it is possible they strongarmed the developers to make them an ARM build for a few select titles...
It's clear gaming was not a major concern, it's just "good enough" for someone running AI models and occasionally wants to play some games, not made to primarily play games.
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#48Unified RAM means its soldered to the mainboard, right? I'm not sure if I like this. Sure for a laptop this might be not a big problem but if this ARM ecosystem is a success it will spread to desktop computers and I fear we could lose the existing modularity.
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Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#49This will crush the M5 Max going by the numbers. I'm curious to see how much they end up costing
It won't, the top tier RTX Spark has the same exact CPU and GPU as DGX Spark, so you can check DGX Spark CPU benchmarks to see how it fares. Spoiler: it's about M3 Max level. And they're only coming this fall.
Re: Nvidia RTX Spark
#50For 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.