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AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

lttlabs.com

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Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

#41

Post by yomismoaqui »

url00 wrote: post #21
glimshe wrote: post #7

How much are we going to pay for "AI kits" once the DRAM shortage is over? Will we be able to run a local model equivalent to the current AI frontier in sub $1000 hardware, even if dedicated, in 5 years?

Yeeeeep. There is no moat at the moment. AI companies are trying to dig one as fast as they possibly can. Either through passing laws to prevent local inference ("It's too dangerous! We need to control it") or by creating/limiting possible integrations (locking down OS/hardware, APIs/MCPs that only work with Claude/ChatGPT, etc).

Good luck trying to enforce those laws outside of the USA. And in the future China will be happy to sell local inference hardware at competitive prices.

Open, cheap & good enough will win the race.

Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

#42

Post by danielrmay »

Perhaps if less spending went towards their private aviation interests LTT labs could review a piece of hardware that was released _this_ year, or maybe extend their narrow testing process to cover real-world use metrics like TTFT. Not to mention the lack of real value-perf comparison to CUDA

Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

#43

Post by wolttam »

aunty_helen wrote: post #35

256gbs memory bandwidth is about 1/4 that of a 3090. It would be a better buy with half the memory at 4x the speed.

Are you sure about that? High memory speed is great for dense models, or when serving at high concurrency.

However for local single-user setups, it's often better to have access to more capable/bigger MoE models at reasonable speeds and lower concurrences, which is enabled by these platforms.

Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

#45

Post by cyanydeez »

aunty_helen wrote: post #35

256gbs memory bandwidth is about 1/4 that of a 3090. It would be a better buy with half the memory at 4x the speed.

what matters is how much memory it has; with the new MTP models, Qwen3.6 with 35B MOE, it's pumping out tokens up to ~80k context with little slow down.

It's great to get lots of tokens, but being able to handle and extent context is why it'll continue to be a great machine compared to any of the small graphics cards.

Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

#46

Post by kcb »

Catloafdev wrote: post #23

These devices were great when they were cheaper than the DGX Spark. But when they cost the same price (unless the Spark has shot up too), there's no reason to buy this over a Spark. The Spark is literally a faster version of this, with better software support. Edit: And I say that as an owner of a Ryzen AI Max 395 device.

Ability to run any OS is a pretty nice benefit versus the spark.

Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

#47

Post by cyanydeez »

Catloafdev wrote: post #23

These devices were great when they were cheaper than the DGX Spark. But when they cost the same price (unless the Spark has shot up too), there's no reason to buy this over a Spark. The Spark is literally a faster version of this, with better software support. Edit: And I say that as an owner of a Ryzen AI Max 395 device.

yeah, if only there wasn't some global hegemony that immediately drove up the price of all memory everywhere...

Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

#48

Post by cyanydeez »

nightski wrote: post #30
vlian2088 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's 2026.07 and 128 GB of VRAM costs a firstborn.

The spark also has 128GB VRAM (same type) and by recently I mean I bought them last week for $3999 each.

yeah, so $500 spread https://www.microcenter.com/product/699008/nvidia-dgx-spark is what the current price appears to be.

The differences are basically, sparks require ARM and sparks allow interconnects; so if you do have dreams of electric sheep to chain them together, you're not gonna get the AMD halo units.

But if you just want to putz around with a dev machine and do other things, not sure you'd want a spark.

Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

#49

Post by muyuu »

aunty_helen wrote: post #35

256gbs memory bandwidth is about 1/4 that of a 3090. It would be a better buy with half the memory at 4x the speed.

it depends

it allows you to run smaller models much better

imo 3090s make the most sense if you can buy at least 2x ideally 4x but of course we're talking about a completely different budget at that point

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