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Tepix 5 hours ago

You can get two Strix Halo PCs with similar specs for that $4000 price. I just hope that prompt preprocessing speeds will continue to improve, because Strix Halo is still quite slow in that regard.

Then there is the networking. While Strix Halo systems come with two USB4 40Gbit/s ports, it's difficult to

a) connect more than 3 machines with two ports each

b) get more than 23GBit/s or so per connection, if you're lucky. Latency will also be in the 0.2ms range, which leaves room for improvement.

Something like Apple's RDMA via Thunderbolt would be great to have on Strix Halo…

coder543 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As you allude, the prompt processing speeds are a killer improvement of the Spark which even 2 Strix Halo boxes would not match.

Prompt processing is literally 3x to 4x higher on GPT-OSS-120B once you are a little bit into your context window, and it is similarly much faster for image generation or any other AI task.

Plus the Nvidia ecosystem, as others have mentioned.

One discussion with benchmarks: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1oonomc/comment...

If all you care about is token generation with a tiny context window, then they are very close, but that’s basically the only time. I studied this problem extensively before deciding what to buy, and I wish Strix Halo had been the better option.

Aurornis 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The primary advantage of the DGX box is that it gives you access to the nVidia ecosystem. You can develop against it almost like a mini version of the big servers you're targeting.

It's not really intended to be a great value box for running LLMs at home. Jeff Geerling talks about this in the article.

cmrdporcupine 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Exactly this. I'm not sure why people keep drumming the "a Mac or Strix Halo is faster/cheaper" drum. Different market.

If I want to do hobby / amateur AI research or do stuff with fine tuning models etc, learn the tooling. I'm better off with the DG10 than AMD or Apple's systems.

The Strix Halo machines look nice. I'd like one of those too. Especially if/when they ever get around to getting it into a compelling laptop.

But I ordered the ASUS Ascent DG10 machine (since it was more easily available for me than the other versions of these) because I want to play around with fine tuning open weight models, learning tooling, etc.

That and I like the idea of having a (non-Apple) Aarch64 linux workstation at home.

Now if the courier would just get their shit together and actually deliver the thing...

mapontosevenths 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have this device, it's exactly as you say. This is a device for AI research and development. My buddies mac ultra beats it squarely for inference workloads, but for real tinkering it can't be beat.

I've used it to fine tune 20+ models in the last couple of weeks. Neither a Mac or Strix Halo even try to compete.

lostmsu 7 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I got ASUS ROG Flow Z13 128G with Ryzen AI 395, and I am able to train nanoGPT with little effort. On Windows (haven't tried Linux), where ROCm was just released recently.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052535