alt Hacker NewsNvidia RTX Spark
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Some competition for Apple in this space and competition for Intel and AMD is great.
But I really do question how well Windows on Arm is really going to work out long term.
For Apple it worked because they were able to force the issue. If you wanted a new Mac it was going to be Arm and we all knew eventually (this year or is it next year?) Intel support would drop. Over time we have seen M series exclusive features.
Developers were forced to update or abandon Mac which gave users a great experience (with some early growing pains).
This is something that Windows will never be able too do. They will always be stuck maintaining an emulator and a likely large subset of apps only supporting one over the other. (also does this work the other way around with an Arm only app working on x86?)
This seems like a repeat of when it was not uncommon for games to only support Intel or AMD or NVIDIA or AMD. But worse since they are not both x86. Sure at least we have emulation but just like with Rosetta2 it shouldn't ever be the long term solution.
I think this is the first time an ARM windows device gets marketed for gaming. Would be interesting to see what kind of performance hit games have on the x86 to ARM translation layer.
No thunderbolt is a big no for me. Its one of the greatest feature of MacbookPro that makes it dockable and expandable as a desktop with a good thunderbolt dock.
Perfect for https://github.com/antirez/ds4 :)
I am wary of those ARM-based Windows machines because I am unsure how good the ongoing driver support for those SoCs will be. Will they even outlive the Windows version they currently ship with?
Looking at devices like the NVIDIA Shield gives me some hope that NVIDIA will be better than Qualcomm here. I just hope this is not a case where the OEM has to purchase X years of driver support from the chip vendor beforehand, and that NVIDIA will provide support directly itself.
"Unified Memory" still means divided address space right? You have to pre-allocate system vs gpu and copy from one to the other?
Question is: "Can it run Doom?"
It's been almost 30 years, and a single letter changed. When will we get the Sparkstation, the UltraSpark and the SuperSpark?
We'll need to wait for the benchmarks, but this looks great! Windows 11 ARM64 is already amazing, and if these really are an upgrade from the Qualcomm chips we're going to have even better laptops on the market.
For anyone curious to know how this will fare against Macbooks, at least in CPU perf: DGX Spark has the exact same GPU and CPU as the top RTX Spark laptops will, so you can just directly compare from that.
Of course, DGX Spark is a miniPC, so laptops will likely be slower due to power limits/throttling.
Awesome, won't be buying it all at current prices but once they calm down, I will very much like to get one.
Around 2-3K USD something with a good GPU + CPU + 128GB of integrated RAM is just going to be an awesome experience.
Considering Mac options are north of 5K+ even on a regular day.
What is this product anyway? Is it a general purpose CPU or is it specifically designed for MS Windows? Nvidia stepping back from the open source?
"Introducing the NVIDIA RTX Spark™ Superchip. The fusion of NVIDIA AI and RTX graphics in a single chip redefines Windows PCs and delivers amazing creating, AI development, and gaming—on the slimmest, most beautiful RTX laptops ever and small, ultra-efficient desktops."
Yeaaaah . But at what Cost though.
Will NVIDIA get a monopoly on providing laptops and desktops with a lot of RAM going forward?
It was wintel (windows + intel) before. This will be what? Windia? Wintek?
They made their own x86 CPU? Or was that part outsourced? Ok ARM MediaTek.
I didn't see this in the article but elsewhere I've seen the memory bandwidth quoted as 600GB/s [1]. For comparison:
- 5090/6000 Pro: 1792GB/s
- 5080:: 960GB/s
- 5070Ti: 892GB/s
- M3 Ultra: 819GB/s
- DGX Spark: 273GB/s (less than an M5 Pro at 307GB/s)
Memory bandwidth isn't everything but it will cap inference rate pretty heavily. Also, the M3 Ultra is for an almost 2 year old Mac Studio. It's widely expected that it'll be refreshed in Q3 with a likely M5 or M4 Ultra with >1000GB/s. I really hope Apple realizes what a market opportunity Apple has here.
The above shows just how good value the 5090 really is. It basically is a stripped down rTX 6000 Pro, which is a ~$10k card, for 20-30% of the price. This also demonstrates how NVidia uses VRAM for market segmentation. As an aside, the true data center cards (eg B100, H100) use HBM memory at ~3.2TB/s.
[1]: https://wccftech.com/nvidia-enters-pc-space-with-rtx-spark/
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these. /slashdot
ARM64+GPU sure seems like the future. I'm still using my M1 and even that can handle models well, has decent graphics, M5 is a beast, and M6 must surely go even bigger on LLM compute. Now Microsoft has a compelling ARM64+GPU future too.
What does AMD or Intel have here?
Is this finally Macbook Chip Efficiency coming to Windows or will it just be shittier compatibility for slightly better battery life?
Unified RAM means its soldered to the mainboard, right?
I'm not sure if I like this. Sure for a laptop this might be not a big problem but if this ARM ecosystem is a success it will spread to desktop computers and I fear we could lose the existing modularity.
After nvidia's many years of neglecting Linux, paired with direct Microsoft's involvement? Are we going to trust them, to allow installing Linux in these easily?
I don't think so.
This most likely be a winmodem situation, again
hope nvidia support driver better than qualcomm. also hope they support linux soon.
I have no idea how powerful or power efficient these guys are, but this seems to be the first step in a bigger push towards Windows on ARM (without loosing gaming).
I think more announcements will follow soon from other companies.
Looks like the MSI one might be a 2-in-1, if it has good stylus support I might have a good candidate for an upgrade, thought my ~3-4 year old Galaxy Book is holding up alright for now.
I really like this, but I think the reason Apple Silicon took off was that Apple sort of forced devs to support ARM. Not sure if Microsoft can do the same for Windows…
Related:
A powerful new chapter for Windows PCs, accelerated by Nvidia RTX Spark
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352693
Surface Laptop Ultra: Made for World Makers
competitor is already on the market and is x86: AMD AI 395+
bechmarks with DGX arnt spectacular for NVIDIAs software and CUDA lead.
wouldnt count on this being a price/compute challenger. especially with overpriced VRAM.
Some other relevant discussions and sources …
NVIDIA and Microsoft Reinvent Windows PCs for the Age of Personal AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352705
NVIDIA DGX Station for Windows Puts a Trillion-Parameter AI Supercomputer on Every Enterprise Desk
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352691
Introducing Surface Laptop Ultra: Made for world makers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352627
Introducing a powerful new chapter for Windows PCs, accelerated by NVIDIA RTX Spark
It all sounds good on paper. But I have trouble believing Windows can be a good platform for this. Microsoft has lost all trust after inserting ads into windows, slowly removing power user features, and exploiting every dark pattern they can. And for years, the ARM based Windows laptops have been useless due to app compatibility issues. Why would this change now? Is it priced to be a lot cheaper than Apple’s laptops? Or is this a niche product for AI developers basically?
This may finally be the chip family ARM on Windows has always needed. Qualcomm's chips have always been dogs with slow off-the-shelf ARM CPU cores that have pathetic single-threaded performance compared to x86 AMD/Intel or ARM Apple Silicon designs.
This will crush the M5 Max going by the numbers. I'm curious to see how much they end up costing
[delayed]