Being NVidia, it better deliver an experience that makes gaming worthwhile in performance of AAA titles.
In fact, my current ASUS laptop did not allow me to install Windows until I have performed a sophisticated dance to update/flash some sort of low-level disk-related Intel bloatware. The laptop was sold without OS and was accompanied by a small paper referencing a website with instruction how to flash the firmware to actually make the laptop usable.
On the GNU/Linux side, the only thing has been Chromebooks, which aren't worth their money for the usual 4/8 GB, 126 GB, average SOC, most devices have.
Maybe, just maybe, they are reaching that billion this decade or so, but looking at those numbers it's rather in the range of 10% of that.
Still a huge number, but that's a fraction of PC market.
Obviously Nvidia can't control the Windows part, but if they are targeting gaming as the primary market, not sure how much Windows api's are involved in that.
I don't think this is likely to truly pan out though. I can't imagine Nvidia making the kind of afffordances that would allow it to develop into a successful market segment. They're inevitably going to gatekeep documentation and aggressively encroach on their partners' margin like they always do.
Meanwhile, if Nvidia is writing its own drivers then documentation isn’t an issue.
The flipside is that stable APIs make it harder for Microsoft to improve the kernel. And once Nvidia decides to stop maintaining its drivers, without public source code or documentation, nobody else can maintain them in its place. Still, there’s something to be said for Microsoft’s approach.
Great! Maybe they'll finally find the time to fix User Space.
See DGX Spark.
jauntywundrkind•1w ago
N1/N1X gpu is rumored to get near 5070-ish speeds! That would be a remarkable feat if true!! 5070 has 670 GB/s (via 192-bit, 1.75GHz GDDR7) memory to do what it does. That's more than twice the bandwidth Strix Halo and DGX Spark offer! That would be very interesting to see in a mobile chip.
Next gen Medusa Halo from AMD is going from quad to hex-channel DDR5: that'll be a bump. But still way short of a 5070's bandwidth, and still likely far more than a year out.
In all likelihood these rumors are probably ridiculously wrong. Nvidia is charging $4000 for DGX spark systems. It's unlikely that this is going to be a vastly more expensive system. It also seems improbable that it's going to be cheaper and vastly more performant. But for a little while longer, i can dream.