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Nvidia RTX Spark

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Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#421

Post by Danox »

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…

Apple has kicked out Motorola, Intel, Nvidia, Google Maps, AMD, Broadcom, Samsung (chip division), and probably Qualcomm in 2027-2028, Apple going back to Nvidia and on reliance CUDA doubtful, even the current Gemini use will be short-lived.

See a pattern there even the memory companies will probably get designed around the Chinese are in the process of doing it now so will Apple probably for long range survival.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#422

Post by Danox »

yurishimo wrote: post #393
internet2000 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sandbagging their x86 offering" is a new one. There's no winning.

The Intel chips of that time were fine but it was a problem from both sides. Apple refused to "compromise" their hardware design and Intel failed to deliver on their promises regarding power/heat budgets and kept telling Apple execs that they were just one cycle away from fixing all of the problems. Ultimately, Apple won that fight when they decided to stop letting Intel control their hardware roadmap and it's been a…

Apple had a similar run-in with AMD and Nvidia. Over design issues.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#423

Post by mbreese »

Danox wrote: post #418
mbreese wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that's such a bad thing. It's not going to challenge the Apple M5, but if you're specifically looking for something in the "not-Mac" market, having a laptop-sized version of the DGX is probably going to be pretty successful.

Then they better release it within the next two weeks.

What's coming out in two weeks?

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#424

Post by brailsafe »

rickdeckard wrote: post #399
brailsafe wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Agree, it's a fairly closed ecosystem, that's why I personally don't use it. But despite that, as a Windows user I acknowledge that any kind of interaction with another Mac from within MacOS (Handoff, Sidecar, Universal Control, Bluetooth-pairing to Apple-ID instead of Hardware MAC-ID,...) is leaps ahead of what Microsoft was doing with their OS for the past years. Just the scenario of an employee getting a Windows l…

Ya I agree. I'm primarily a Mac and Android user, but also use Windows for gaming, and Windows has never been particularly good at anything. It's never been a smooth user experience.

Recently I upgraded my motherboard and tried reinstalling Win10 Pro, but couldn't activate it despite saving the product key. They have at least THREE obscure flows for re-activation depending on how it was originally activated. The license in my flow needed to have been bound to a Microsoft account that I never previously needed, because it ties itself to the hardware. I had to dismantle and rebuild with my old installation, activate it with my old motherboard on a Microsoft account that I wasn't planning to use to login with, then rebuild again with my new components, sign in to activate, and then disable sign in to be able to use a local user account. Insane.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#425

Post by brailsafe »

msh wrote: post #389
brailsafe wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Hmm, that actually is an important difference. I was considering trying to set something like this up so I didn't have to bring two laptops with me while traveling, but was skeptical it would go smoothly, apparently for good reason.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#426

Post by h14h »

ribosometronome wrote: post #298
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…

That workflow has been around for awhile now. I'm sure there are others but LM Studio has a model browser in app that effectively simplifies things to hitting download and hitting launch. The complexity tends to be in that there's a lot of models to choose from and also knowing how to set up whatever tool you're using with a local model. None of it's particularly hard, unless you start trying to customize settings. I…

The performance hangup is definitely a barrier, but I think LM Studio and other similar apps are still too far on the "techy" end of the spectrum and have UX barriers that will need to be addressed. IMO for most people, exposing things even as "basic" as the official model name is a leaky abstraction that could be overwhelming.

If the first thing (for example) my mom sees upon installing the app is a dropdown model picker that contains things like "Qwen3.6-35b-a3b-mlx" she will 100% be bouncing off of it.

IMO the best version of this is a custom app/harness with a couple of pre-selected (and ideally fine-tuned) open models that immediately start downloading after checking the system's hardware specs. This would likely be a turn-off to most devs, but is absolutely essential if building an app for general consumers.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#427

Post by ChocolateGod »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #394
gargan wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Those are specific firmwares for those devices that are either closed-source binary blobs, open-source hackjobs/reverse engineered attempts, or just plain missing firmwares. The fault is not on Linux but rather on Qualcomm not releasing things for that specific SoC. Some SoC's have better support than others. ARM cpu's themselves works perfectly fine on linux. Intel has closed things down: some wifi and webcam firmwa…

> Those are specific firmwares for those devices that are either closed-source binary blobs, open-source hackjobs/reverse engineered attempts, or just plain missing firmwares

This isn't fully the reason, Linux is infamous for requiring a specific build for each SoC (and usually each board of said SoC) where as Windows on ARM uses ACPI which Linux doesn't support to the same level. Linux prefers the landfill promoting device tree for each device approach.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#428

Post by freedomben »

abenga wrote: post #411
lmm wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What trouble? If you want a GPU that works on Linux, let alone FreeBSD, you buy nVidia, install their drivers and get on with your life (and sure, maybe you can't use Wayland, but why would you want to?). I'm all for open-source in theory, but in practice the AMD drivers cause far more trouble than the nVidia ones ever do.

After I switched from Nvidia to AMD GPUs on my main rig, I can now run Sid without issue and upgrade my Kernel whenever I want to without getting a black screen with a blinking cursor on the next boot.

Indeed. Having a machine where I don't live in fear after every reboot is a killer feature for AMD

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#429

Post by MoonWalk »

kllrnohj wrote: post #234
MoonWalk wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment I'm replying to appears to be talking about power DELIVERY, not consumption. Why would extra power-delivery capacity be intolerable?

The DGX Spark doesn't have a battery. If it comes with 200W delivery (actually 240W), it's because it plans on consuming close to that amount. Although I'm kinda surprised the DGX Spark used USB-C at all for power instead of just like a DC jack or whatever. But whatever.

Thanks for the info. The use of the term "delivery" doesn't seem to make sense in this context, but OK.

Re: Nvidia RTX Spark

#430

Post by FireBeyond »

Danox wrote: post #417
FireBeyond wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one that Apple discontinued not because of demand but memory pricing?

Isn't there a possibility they were killed because the M5 Ultra is coming why waste memory on a M3 series Ultra or any other high memory Mac Studio computer when the next generation is coming within six months?

Possible, to be sure. But given that you could still buy the cheesegrater Mac Pro (with RAM and disk at 2019 prices, and a 2019 CPU at 2019 prices) right up to the week that the the M2 Ultra Mac Pro was announced, that would be something new. Not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, to be sure, but still.
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