alt Hacker NewsThis feels fluff to me on the part of the author (whose work I don’t want to trivialize) but I don’t think they’ve actually looked deeper than a paper spec sheet on this.
1. Yes it has the same number of cores as a 5070 mobile. It’s also running at a shared peak of 2/3 the bandwidth and a shared peak of 2/3 the TDP. The GPU by itself will likely perform at half the dedicated units performance
2. Apple may not have SVE2 but they do have the AMX (private) and SME. I don’t see why he thinks the SVE2 will give him more performance than the SME.
3. He mentions a single core type but doesn’t mention the total makeup. We already have known for a year how the DGX Spark compares to Apple chips. For CPU it’s roughly equivalent to an M3 Pro and for GPU compute (not rasterization) it’s between an M4 Pro and M4 Max without considering bandwidth.
The real advantage to these is that they run CUDA. That’s it. Otherwise when they launch they’ll be 2-3 generations behind where Apple is and 1 gen behind AMD.
The other super power of the DGX Spark was the NIC for pairing them together. But that’s been removed here too.
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Lemire is very narrowly interested in CPU SIMD so within that niche it may be interesting. As you said, overall the Spark is good but not great.
It is absolutely fluff, and the only reason this worthless tweet is on the front page of HN is that this audience has a habit of canonizing certain people, and treating each of their bowel movements as prophetic.
Guy suddenly became aware of a chip that the rest of the industry long knew about, seems completely unaware of the competitors, and posts about how it's a BEAST and will be a GAME CHANGER.
Like the DGX Spark was a game changer? Eh, it has mostly been a massive disappointment. An overpriced nvidia laptop isn't going to change the equation an iota.
> GPU compute (not rasterization) it’s between an M4 Pro and M4 Max without considering bandwidth
You are likely thinking about token generation which is dependent on memory bandwidth where Apple has an edge. Spark's GPU compute is way higher than even M5 Max (17 FP32 TFlops), around 2x FP32 TFlops... It's literally 6144 CUDA cores like desktop 5070, slowed down by slow memory and lower TDP (29.7 vs 31 FP32 TFlops on 5070).