Asus Ascent GX10 • Hacker News Board

Re: Asus Ascent GX10

#81

Post by WhitneyLand » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 5:43 PM UTC

tassadarforaiur wrote: post #57

WhitneyLand wrote: post #46

GX10 vs MacBook Pro M4 Max: - Price: $3k / $5k - Memory: same (128GB) - Memory bandwidth: ~273GB/s / 546GB/sec - SSD: same (1 TB) - GPU advantage: ~5x-10x depending on memory bottleneck - Network: same 10Gbe (via TB) - Direct cluster: 200Gb / 80Gb - Portable: No / Yes - Free Mac included: No / Yes - Free monitor: No / Yes - Linux out of the box: Yes / No - CUDA Dev environment: Yes : No

On the networking side. M4 max does have thunderbolt 5, 80gbps advertised. Would ip over TB not allow for significantly faster interconnects when clustering Macs?

Made the correction to 80Gb/sec thank you.

W.r.t ip, the fastest I’m aware of is 25Gb/s via TB5 adapters like from Sonnet.

Re: Asus Ascent GX10

#82

Post by jonfw » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 5:44 PM UTC

baby_souffle wrote: post #44

porphyra wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably LLM slop, but also it's the same GB10 chip as the DGX Spark so why would the memory bandwidth be significantly different?

As far as I can tell these are all the same hardware just different enclosures. I'm not sure why Nvidia went this route given that they have a first party device. Usually you only see this when the original manufacturer doesn't want to be in the distribution or support game.

Distribution channels to orgs or countries that don't buy from nvidia. Ability to cut discounts w/o discounting the Nvidia brand

Re: Asus Ascent GX10

#83

Post by uyzstvqs » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 5:47 PM UTC

hamdingers wrote: post #7

simlevesque wrote: post #2

I really wish I had the kind of money to try my hands at it.

You can rent GPUs from many providers for a few bucks an hour.

Even cheaper, unless you want the really high-end enterprise stuff. You can run ComfyUI pretty comfy for $0.30 to $0.40 per hour, if AI art is your goal.

Re: Asus Ascent GX10

#84

Post by aseipp » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 5:47 PM UTC

joelthelion wrote: post #20

"Nvidia dgx os", ugh. It would be a lot more enticing if that thing could run stock Linux.

It's just Ubuntu with precanned Nvidia software, otherwise it's a "normal" UEFI + ACPI booting machine, just like any x86 desktop. People have already installed NixOS and Fedora 43, and you can even go ahead and then install CUDA and it will work, too. (You might be able to forgo the nvidia modules and run upstream Mesa+NVK, even.) It's very different from Jetson and much more like a normal x86 desktop.

The kernel is patched (and maintained by Canonical, not Nvidia) but the patches hanging off their 6.17-next branch didn't look outrageous to me. The main hitch right now is that upstream doesn't have a Realtek r8127 driver for the ethernet controller. There were also some mediatek-related patches that were probably relevant as they designed the CPU die.

Overall it feels close to full upstream support (to be clear: you CAN boot this system with a fully upstream kernel, today). And booting with UEFI means you can just use the nvidia patches on $YOUR_FAVORITE_DISTRO and reboot, no need to fiddle with or inject the proper device trees or whatever.

Re: Asus Ascent GX10

#85

Post by wmf » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

tassadarforaiur wrote: post #57

WhitneyLand wrote: post #46

GX10 vs MacBook Pro M4 Max: - Price: $3k / $5k - Memory: same (128GB) - Memory bandwidth: ~273GB/s / 546GB/sec - SSD: same (1 TB) - GPU advantage: ~5x-10x depending on memory bottleneck - Network: same 10Gbe (via TB) - Direct cluster: 200Gb / 80Gb - Portable: No / Yes - Free Mac included: No / Yes - Free monitor: No / Yes - Linux out of the box: Yes / No - CUDA Dev environment: Yes : No

On the networking side. M4 max does have thunderbolt 5, 80gbps advertised. Would ip over TB not allow for significantly faster interconnects when clustering Macs?

Yes, people use Thundebolt networking to build Mac AI clusters. The Spark has 200G Ethernet that is even faster though.

Re: Asus Ascent GX10

#86

Post by schainks » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 5:49 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #19

I wonder why they even added this to the FAQ if they're gonna weasel their way around it and not answer properly? > What is the memory bandwidth supported by Ascent GX10? > AI applications often require a bigger memory. With the NVIDIA Blackwell GPU that supports 128GB of unified memory, ASUS Ascent GX10 is an AI supercomputer that enables faster training, better real-time inference, and support larger models like LL…

Taiwanese companies are legendary for producing baller hardware with terrible marketing and documentation that answers important questions. It's like those teams don't talk to each other inside the business.

Fortunately, their products are also easy to crack open and probe.

Re: Asus Ascent GX10

#87

Post by schainks » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 5:51 PM UTC

7734128 wrote: post #14

If you touch the image when scrolling on mobile then it opens when you lift your finger. Then when you press the cross in the corner to close the image, the search button behind it is activated. How can a serious company not notice these glaring issues in their websites?

Taiwanese companies still don't value good software engineering, so talented developers who know how to make money leave. This leaves enterprise darlings like Asus stuck with hiring lower tier talent for numbers that look good to accounting.

Re: Asus Ascent GX10

#88

Post by dang » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 5:53 PM UTC

One past related thread. Any others?

The Asus Ascent GX10 a Nvidia GB10 Mini PC with 128GB of Memory and 200GbE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43425935 - March 2025 (50 comments)

Edit: added via wmf's comment below:

"DGX Spark has only half the advertised performance" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45739844 - Oct 2025 (24 comments)

Nvidia DGX Spark: When benchmark numbers meet production reality - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45713835 - Oct 2025 (117 comments)

Nvidia DGX Spark and Apple Mac Studio = 4x Faster LLM Inference with EXO 1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45611912 - Oct 2025 (20 comments)

Nvidia DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45586776 - Oct 2025 (111 comments)

NVIDIA DGX Spark In-Depth Review: A New Standard for Local AI Inference - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45575127 - Oct 2025 (93 comments)

Nvidia DGX Spark - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45008434 - Aug 2025 (207 comments)

Nvidia DGX Spark - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43409281 - March 2025 (10 comments)

Re: Asus Ascent GX10

#89

Post by badgersnake » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 5:58 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #80

simlevesque wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simon Willison seems to like his: https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/codex-spark-gpt-oss

Performance wise it was able to spit out about half of a buggy version of Space Invaders as a single HTML file in roughly a minute.

I’m pretty sure I could spit out something that doesn’t work in half a minute.

Re: Asus Ascent GX10

#90

Post by nycdatasci » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 5:59 PM UTC

I ordered one that arrived last week. It seems like a great idea with horrible execution. The UI shows strange glitchy/artifacts occasionally as if there's a hardware failure.

To get a sense for use cases, see the playbooks on this website: https://build.nvidia.com/spark.

Regarding limited memory bandwidth: my impression is that this is part of the onramp for the DGX Cloud. Heavy lifting/production workloads will still need to be run in the cloud.