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Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

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Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#82
post #68

Okay, so this is not a peripheral that you connect to your computer to run specialized tasks, this is a full computer running Linux. It's a garden hermit. Imagine a future where everyone has one of those(not exactly this version but some future version), it lives with you it learns with you and unlike the cloud based SaaS AI you can teach it things immediately and diverge from the average to your advantage.

I'd love to own one, but doubt this will go beyond a very specific niche. Despite there being advantages, very few still operate their own Plex server over subscriptions to streaming services, and on the local front, I feel that the progress of hardware, alongside findings that smaller models can handle a variety of tasks quite well, will mean a high performance, local workstation of this type will have niche appeal at most.

Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#83
post #81

This looks like a successor to the Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin 64GB Developer Kit: https://www.okdo.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/jetson-agx-o... I wonder what the specifications are in terms of memory bandwidth and computational capability.

Hopefully, the OS support isn't as awful as the Jetson platforms usually are. Unless they change, you'll get 1 or 2 major kernel updates ever and have to do bizarre stuff like install a 6 year old Ubuntu on your x86 PC to run the utility to flash the OS.

Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#84
post #18

Nvidia releases a Linux desktop supercomputer that's better price/performance wise than anything Wintel is doing and their whole new software stack will only run on WSL2. They aren't porting to Win32. Wow, it may actually be the year of Linux on the Desktop.

> Wow, it may actually be the year of Linux on the Desktop. ? Yeah starting at $3,000. Surely a cheap desktop computer to buy for someone who just wants to surf the web and send email /s. There is a reason why it is for "enthusiasts" and not for the general wider consumer or typical PC buyer.

I see the most direct competitor in the Mac Studio, though of course we will have to wait for reviews to gauge how fair that comparison is. The Studio does have a fairly large niche as a solid workstation, though, so I could see this being successful.

For general desktop use, as you described, nearly any piece of modern hardware, from a RasPI, to most modern smartphones with a dock, could realistically serve most people well.

The thing is, you need to serve both, low-end use cases like browsing, and high-end dev work via workstations, because even for the "average user", there is often one specific program on which they need to rely and which has limited support outside the OS they have grown up with. Course, there will be some programs like Desktop Microsoft Office which will never be ported, but still, Digitis could open the doors to some devs working natively on Linux.

A solid, compact, high-performance, yet low power workstation with a fully supported Linux desktop out of the box could bridge that gap, similar to how I have seen some developers adopt macOS over Linux and Windows since the release of the Studio and Max MacBooks.

Again, we have yet to see independent testing, but I would be surprised if anything of this size, simplicity, efficiency and performance was possible in any hardware configuration currently on the market.

Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#85
post #23
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the enthusiast side of things is a negligible part of the market. That said, enthusiasts do help drive a lot of the improvements to the tech stack so if they start using this, it’ll entrench NVIDIA even more.

You could have said the same about gamers buying expensive hardware in the 00's. It's what made Nvidia big.

There's a lot more gamers than people wanting to play with LLms at home.

Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#86

Not much was unveiled but it showed a Blackwell GPU with 1PFLOP of FP4 compute, 128GB unified DDR5X memory, 20 ARM cores, and ConnectX powering two QSFP slots so one can stack multiple of them. edit: While the title says "personal", Jensen did say this was aimed at startups and similar, so not your living room necessarily.

From the size and pricing ($3000) alone, it's safe to conclude it has less raw FLOPs than a 5090. Since it uses LPDDR5X, almost certainly less memory bandwidth too (5090 @ 1.8 TB/s, M4 Max w/ 128GB LPDDR5X @ 546 GB/s). Basically the only advantage is how much VRAM it packs in a small form factor, and presumably greater power efficiency at its smaller scale. The only thing it really competes with is the Mac Studio for…

Making comparisons to the 5090 is silly. That thing draws 500W+ and will require a boat anchor of metal to keep it cool. The device they showed is something more along the lines of a mobile dev kit.

Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#87
post #61
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s actually “10 Arm Cortex-X925 and 10 Cortex-A725” [0]. These are much newer cores and have a reasonable chance of being competitive. [0]: https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/arm-nvidia-project-digits-high...

Good catch, they called it "Grace Blackwell". Changing the CPU cores completely and calling it Grace seems weird. Maybe it was just a mistake during the keynote.

I don't think it was a mistake; maybe they intend Grace to be a broader brand like Ryzen not one particular model.

Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#88
post #83
post #81

This looks like a successor to the Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin 64GB Developer Kit: https://www.okdo.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/jetson-agx-o... I wonder what the specifications are in terms of memory bandwidth and computational capability.

Hopefully, the OS support isn't as awful as the Jetson platforms usually are. Unless they change, you'll get 1 or 2 major kernel updates ever and have to do bizarre stuff like install a 6 year old Ubuntu on your x86 PC to run the utility to flash the OS.

The community likely will make instructions for installing mainstream Linux distributions on it.

Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#89
post #88
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully, the OS support isn't as awful as the Jetson platforms usually are. Unless they change, you'll get 1 or 2 major kernel updates ever and have to do bizarre stuff like install a 6 year old Ubuntu on your x86 PC to run the utility to flash the OS.

The community likely will make instructions for installing mainstream Linux distributions on it.

Doesn't really help though if it requires an nvidia kernel.

Re: Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

#90
post #56

Would consider at a lower price of $500 USD, way too expensive for what it brings.

I think it's cheap at $3000. 128gb RAM, top of the line GPU capabilities, 4tb storage... it's much better than what a top shelf mbp can do and much cheaper

correct, I just spent $4k on an "AI" machine to do stuff. 96GB ram, ryzen 9 9950x 16 core, 4TB nvme, 24tb hdd, rtx 4090.

If this thing was available six months ago I would have bought it instead!

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