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points by dist-epoch 4 days ago | 0 comments
It's not weird at all, they know people will buy these laptops, put linux on them and stash them in data-centers, so they are trying to prevent this.
[–] Roark66 3 days ago
Not those laptops.

I was genuinely excited about this device until I heard the specs. Still under 300GB/s memory bandwidth when a gpu like rtx3090 from 6 years ago had 900+

This is really bread crumbing local inference users.

We should be measuring our memory bandwidth in TB by now. The only company that seems to be serious about this is Apple. (the m5 ultra studio etc).

[–] jasomill 3 days ago
If this were cost-effective, why wouldn't they just buy DGX Sparks, with similar performance at similar price points and a more convenient form factor?

Or RTX Spark and run their workloads under WSL, which as the article notes, has minimal overhead relative to running Linux directly?

This sounds more like a bug than a feature, especially given that Linux on battery runs at full clock speed and downclocks when plugged in, and Windows does the opposite, suggesting they could at least mitigate the problem with no changes to their software stack by inverting a conditional in the firmware and adding a Linux kernel parameter to control memory allocation as apparently already exists for Windows.

[–] kllrnohj 3 days ago
that seems really hard to believe? If you wanted this running Linux in a data center you'd have just been buying the cheaper and yet also more powerful DGX Sparks.

The only value proposition of RTX Spark at all is the laptop form factor

[–] dist-epoch 3 days ago
> NVIDIA says that the new DGX Spark 64GB is starting at $4,999

> NVIDIA has now confirmed an official starting price of $2,399 for RTX Spark laptops

https://shattered.io/nvidia-rtx-spark-mediatek-oems-price-20...

https://www.servethehome.com/nvidia-dgx-spark-64gb-launched-...

[–] kllrnohj 3 days ago
Nvidia's MSRP is full of shit and has been for a long time. You see it with desktop GPUs all the time, even before the AI boom, where Nvidia would make up an MSRP but not offer a card at that price themselves, and none of the AIBs would, either, except for some token amount that rapidly sold out and were never restoked.

If we look at what you can actually buy the 64GB RTX Spark is $4,500 and the 128GB one is $7,000: https://eshop.asus.com/us/31150-us-cnf-auto.html & https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptop-computers/spd/xps16dx...

Hell there doesn't seem to be an RTX Spark that's sub $3,300 when considering the 32GB models even. $2,399 is pure fiction.

[–] jasomill 3 days ago
The minimum configuration appears to be 24GB / 18 core, which at least one vendor, Microsoft, is selling for $2,599.99, which is at least closer to $2,399 than $3,000+.
[–] jasomill 3 days ago
If datacenters aren't lining up to buy 64GB DGX Sparks for $5,000, what makes you think they'd be interested in 24GB RTX Sparks with fewer cores and less attractive form factors for almost half that?

And if there's a market for a DGX Spark configuration with a higher compute-to-RAM ratio, why isn't Nvidia offering it?

My best guess is that the entry-level Sparks are mostly intended for people who would otherwise be in the market for a traditional high-end laptop, who might be enticed to spend a few hundred more for at least the promise of local AI, while the higher-end models are intended for more serious AI development.

With that said, it's not hard to imagine there isn't nearly as large a built-in market for high-end SFF Linux PCs as there is for high-end Windows laptops.

[–] Roark66 3 days ago
No sane perse would buy dgx spark for datacenter. If you need Blackwell for the native nvfp4 you'd be better buying pallets of rtx5060 ti 16GB. Or if you don't, pallets of used rtx3090s.

In fact I'm pretty sure it's happening. Why? Because of constantly growing prices of those things.

[–] kllrnohj 3 days ago
Sure, but if you think it's insane to buy a DGX Spark for a datacenter, then it's equally insane to buy an RTX Spark (which is the exact same SoC just with less networking and a screen) for the datacenter.
[–] aurareturn 4 days ago
Yes, exactly this.

Nvidia does something to prevent abuse so that regular people who want the laptops can buy one. Nvidia gets knocked on.

[–] kllrnohj 3 days ago
Regular people aren't buying a $4,500 laptop lol wtf are you talking about?

This is all but certainly a bug in their linux driver and nothing else. It sure as hell isn't some "anti abuse" to enable "regular people" to buy one.