points by keybrd-intrrpt 3 days ago | 0 comments
And the DGX Spark and DGX Station both are Ubuntu based linux.
How does your conspiracy theory hold up to that?
GB10 and N1X are both Blackwell cousins. So they've had consumer-level Linux machines for a while now.
This was simply a partnership with Microsoft, so of course development of drivers and firmware focused heavily on Windows. Especially since I'm sure Windows required a LOT of updating to run nicely on ARM as well as the N1X unified memory model.
[–] wtallis 2 days ago
[–] yunnpp 3 days ago
They have data centers to sell, and it's not out of this world for Microsoft to have requested a nerf as part of their "partnership".
You may as well be right, I am speculating and this theory might be baseless (I don't think it is.) But GP's comment is wrong to ask people to simply read the article at face value. That is bad reading.
GB10 and N1X are the same thing. It's the same silicon.
> Especially since I'm sure Windows required a LOT of updating to run nicely on ARM as well as the N1X unified memory model.
Windows has been shipping with ARM64 support for 8 years; Microsoft and Qualcomm already took care of those hurdles, which was almost certainly a key factor in NVIDIA's decision to build a laptop SoC in the first place.
They have not figured out how to make Windows work nicely on a unified memory model: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/rtx-spark-on-windows-c... Either you deal with those problems and having to reboot to change how much memory is reserved for the GPU, or you run with minimal reserved memory and most of your GPU memory accesses take a ~4x latency hit. Most RTX Spark systems seem to be shipping with a 50/50 split out of the box.
NVIDIA has had a full year since shipping DGX Spark (which was already clearly quite late to marker) to finish polishing the Windows support and power management. For them to ship in this state and regress the quality of Linux support on the same silicon is quite convincing evidence that they're half-assing this and really don't care about this platform the way they care about their datacenter cash cows.