Local AI was/is bound to happen, eventually. It'd be smart of Nvidia to get ahead of it.

Non-techy consumers may never do it, but at some point businesses are going to start asking when do they stop paying per token and start running models themselves. Right now the hardware is cost prohibitive, but I doubt that'll always be the case. Eventually the hardware will get cheaper and more available, and Nvidia seems to be betting on that.

They don't care where inference happens, so long as it happens on Nvidia hardware.

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 downside would be Apple effectively having a monopoly in "Agent-ready" consumer electronics. Hopefully local AI both becomes the norm, and there is sufficient competition among the consumer platforms.

Side-note: I would love to see an "RTX Spark" Framework 13 mainboard at some point.

I don't think there's any incentive for Nvidia to make this a Windows-only device, so most likely it will be fully supported on Linux, just like their GPUs are.

Honestly this looks like Microsoft must have thrown a pile of money at them to not mention it, as it's just too obviously the main question.

No one seriously cares about this running Windows. We want Steam and CUDA/Ollama, and Windows just gets in the way. nVidia are simply not that oblivious, but I have to admit in their position I'd have considered the Microsoft involvement more trouble than it's worth, which is among the many reasons I'm not a billionaire.

Maybe they think the RAM market is so terrible it will kill the whole initiative regardless.

Sort of. It's the same chipset as in the DGX Spark & DGX Station, which run Ubuntu (NVIDIA's flavor).

DGX Spark comes with linux out of the box, it would be hard to imagine this device is not also compatible

This is strangely absent from the news.

It's a collaboration with Microsoft so going to say no, probably not.

Rosetta on Mac was obviously impressive. There was also impressive Arm->Intel translation in the mobile ecosystem at one time.

One reason it works surprisingly well on modern systems is how much is offloaded to the GPU. You aren't going to get great power optimization or anything without it being truly native though.

There are games which are CPU limited though, and it will be interesting how those do. Curiously those also tend to be in engines with Arm support already.

Apple Silicon has a special mode that modified how the ARM chip handles memory transactions to be like x86. Does this nvidia ARM have the same?

What would be interesting to me would be how quickly developers start targeting ARM64 directly.

For Apple it worked because they waited until they had a really, really good ARM ISA CPU (combined with arguably sandbagging their x86 offering for a few years prior but I digress).

Qualcomm is also working on a really good ARM ISA CPU with their acquisition of NuVia and subsequent Oryon architecture.

Meanwhile this is just using off-the-shelf ARM CPUs in a MediaTek SoC with blackwell bolted to the side of it. ARM's CPUs so far have been subpar for laptop-class chips. Hence why neither Apple nor Qualcomm are using them.

That's surely one thing, Apple went all-in on ARM, for Microsoft it's still a kinda "reduced experience".

But the bigger problem in my opinion: How much of the Windows userbase actually sticks to Windows because of its backwards-compatibility?

--> What would happen if they break this model and the OS is only judged based on its user experience and available applications...?

I'm not sure it would stand any chance to compete in the B2C space. If I think about it, there's not a single new feature in Windows of the last ~20 years I particularly care about.

Without backwards compatibility, there's barely any ecosystem. MacOS on the other hand is full of ecosystem features, improving collaboration, connectivity, handoff across devices, etc.

I feel like making universal binaries a thing, and pushing for it to be standard is one viable path.

UEFI, display panels, wifi, storage controllers, etc would be what I'm worried about. I doubt Microsoft is going to make it easy.

DGX Spark is also $4700

Will we get enterprise ready open firmware too instead of this "we missed DOS so we invented UEFI" for boot firnware?

SuperSpark and then UltraSpark. And then we can get SparkCube, Sparkii, and SparkiiU.

DGX Spark is $4700, so I kind of doubt that RTX Spark's top configs will be cheaper than that.

They're Turing complete. What else do you need?

not for llm full training, but can do some finetuning for sure.

I believe training is way more processor intensive than inference.

Thats also possible with usb-c.

yes, same chip

+ Windows

+ Screen

- ConnectX-7 Smart NIC

Spark memory bandwidth is ~300 GB/s. Internal bandwidth is 600 GB/s but that doesn't matter.

128 GB at 600 GB/s for this versus 32 GB at 1800 GB/s for 5090.

This is much better value than 5090, you can run much bigger models.

Yeah and also the quoted 1 PF is only for sparse models (only half that for dense, if that), and the DGX had serious hardware issues: https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1982831774850748825

No. You can get a PowerBook today with 128 GB ram.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1957120-REG/apple_mbp...

Winvidia

Nvideous

Nvidiows

Nvindows

ARM cpu made by MediaTek.

I heard leaked geekbench putting it behind the m3, which is couple years old now.

All I care about is if I can get one of these for significantly less than a dgx and get Linux on it for some cuda Blackwell kerneling.

It’s nivdia attempting to compete with Apple’s M-series

I wouldn't say it's Nvidia stepping back from open source... if anything this is doubling down on it, as one of the selling points of this is the 128GB of unified memory which will allow for hosting local models (i.e, nvidia's new open model they just released). I guess it's pretty cool, I'm a big supporter of local LLMs/open weight models so seems enticing to me, although I'm not sure this will be super applicable to a lot of regular consumers. Seems like a pretty niche product.

Linux works but MS is just paying them not to mention it.

"Unified" means that it's shared between CPU and GPU, I believe.

But yes, it tends to be soldered on.

No, but LPDDR means soldered, there are no LPDDR dimms

I think unified RAM means soldered to the SoC, which is in turn soldered to the mainboard

My DGX Sparks are the first and only devices I have with 200W USB-C PD. Low power by AI workstation standards, but intolerable in a laptop.

It's worth noting that Nvidia power management on Linux has been absymal. There also aren't any of the usual power management options to see how much power things are using, which is quite atypical for a modern system.

Nvidia really threw stuff over the wall with the DGX Spark release. They don't seem to really care. I sort of think they'll spend a little more time on Windows, where there's no pesky upstreaming to do and they can just do whatever, but man, it's such typical hubris from Nvidia to build such an expensive box with good chips but make it basically unsupportable and roasty hot all the time.

You also generally have to run an ever more stale two year old Ubuntu derived DGX OS to get anywhere, with bespoke kernel and drivers all. None of it is well supported, none of it just works like a comparable PC or even well behaved arm system would.

As for other ARM, there were rumors AMD Sound Wave is/was going to be a ~10W arm APU, but there hasn't been much said about it lately. Honestly given the ram crunch, it's maybe just not worth trying to build a system with a cheap core, if the rest of your costs are going to stay so stratospheric. https://www.techpowerup.com/341848/amd-sound-wave-arm-powere...

Developers weren’t really “forced” to support ARM. They simply recognized that all future Macs would be ARM, whereas most new PCs would continue to run on x86. So the incentive to adopt ARM was much weaker on the PC side.

They didn’t though. Rosetta 2.

Microsoft can do the same for windows - they need to address the fat bundle solution that Apple came up with, but for Windows, though ..

Don't know about intel, but AMD has Strix Halo with unified memory and really impressive performance.

I think the future will be 50/50 x64 vs arm64 for PCs.

DGX Spark has the same soc and ships with Ubuntu

Strix halo's 8060S gpu is very weak, and is roughly equivalent to a 4060 laptop GPU, whereas GB10's gpu is equivalent to a desktop 5070. For LLM throughput, tok/s is similar due to bottleneck by memory bandwidth, but the GB10 has 3x faster prefill. People have also been able to squeeze out much better performance on GB10 using NVFP4 and other improvements in the months after the DGX Spark launch, so don't be misled by early lackluster benchmarks. For the RTX Spark, which also targets gaming and creative applications, the 3x faster GPU is quite nice.

Or like a m4 max? This thing has <300GB/s vs the max with 550GB/s

All those CUDA cores in the sparks but they're starved for memory bandwidth.

I am still waiting for NVidia to release a system that legit beats 3090 maxxing for the home gamer...

The only Question is is it worth suffering hip and x86? I suspect a lot of folks might like a machine that mimics their GB300 But costs less than a dgx.

Also I heard the tensor core instructions on the dgx are gimped and you’re better off with a rtx pro x000. Is that the same with these machines?

Is CUDA really a lead for long? Aren’t all the latest competitive approaches avoiding all the standard software stacks and writing deeply customized software that is very directly tied to whatever hardware they use?

And is it really a way to lock in people? With AI coding tools, isn’t it trivial to write software on top of CUDA and rewrite it to target some other hardware?

2 comments in total there

Anecdotally Windows ARM works fine for me, although to be honest most of my work is command line + browser anyway. WSL works like a treat. Steam installs and most lower end games also play fine on my ARM laptop too. Games that require kernel anticheat don't work.

I think they make a great "second device" where you have something meatier to fall back to if something doesn't quite work right. I'm not sure if it's ready to take on the "main device" role just yet. But it's a far far better experience than the Surface RT days.

The "gaming" take is a strange one indeed for an ARM platform. Hopefully they (Microsoft or Nvidia?) put some real effort into the translation layer. They claim modern AAA games, but it is possible they strongarmed the developers to make them an ARM build for a few select titles...

Who cares about Windows, the goal is to run local AI models similar to AMD Strix Halo and Apple Silicon machines. The OS is honestly a distant last concern as long as the models work well, as you could put Linux on these too, but not sure how well wake lock works.

A lot of the app compatibility issues on current machines are down to Qualcomm's poor drivers - the actual core bits are mostly okay.

Hopefully MSFT would look at this as a do or die system, and go all in on improving the user and ownership experience. Will they? Not so sure.

Not at all. This is a more like what Apple has been doing the past few years. A bunch of decent arm cores paired with a beefy integrated GPU.

No.

For reference, this is just a single benchmark, but as an idea of each vendor's top mobile CPU single-threaded performance:

Geekbench Single Thread Score:

- DGX Spark (same CPU as RTX Spark): 3125

- Snapdragon X1 Elite: 2950

- Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme: 4050

- AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX: 3225

- Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus: 3175

- Apple M5 Max: 4350

I'm happy to be wrong about Qualcomm's latest X2 chip performance, even if it is shipping in only a single product so far. Their previous best was the lowest in this list.

This will likely have worse single threaded performance than recent Qualcomm CPUs.

These chips also appear to be using off-the-shelf ARM cores.

Qualcomm Snapdragon x1 and upcoming x2 use their Oryon core and have much faster single-thread performance than Intel/Amd and this nvidia soc that uses off-the-shelf arm cores

It won't, the top tier RTX Spark has the same exact CPU and GPU as DGX Spark, so you can check DGX Spark CPU benchmarks to see how it fares. Spoiler: it's about M3 Max level. And they're only coming this fall.

Nah, still ~300GB/s memory bandwidth. That will be slower than the M5 max, by a wide margin for LLM inference.

M5 max is 3x stronger and 50% more power efficient. nice try though.