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Gecko4072today at 11:06 AM1 replyview on HN

You personally? Just curious. Context window is also a factor and ram isn’t really cheap. Sparks are assembled units which I like.


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dannywtoday at 12:30 PM

For the same price as a DGX Spark here (A$8499) I can buy roughly 544GB of DDR5-5200MHz from retail; which on a quad channel platform would deliver ~160gb/s real world; and ~320gb/s with octa channels (Xeon, Threadripper Pro).

If you can afford it or somehow find a used unit, you can go Epyc for 12 channels.

8/12 channel DDR5 will beat DGX Spark in inference/decode even without a GPU of any kind, as it’s memory bandwidth bound, and the Spark tops out at ~240gb/s real world.

With some optimisation and maths, it’s entirely plausible to ach

You are paying an extraordinary amount of money for the convenience of a super small unit, with still mediocre software support, but at least a community. Expect to be crawling through forum posts regularly, as SM121/Spark has many quirks and ecosystem issues still.

Please don’t pay another 70-80% gross margins on top of already inflated DRAM prices unless you need. The Spark IS really nice if you want to test out ConnectX or if you really need something small and compact and quiet.

Also consider: used Adas or even Ampere NVIDIA workstation GPUs can come with a lot of VRAM and be “reasonable”, with CUDA.

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