Nvidia RTX Spark

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/products/rtx-spark/

43•shenli3514•1h ago

Comments

SilverElfin•1h ago

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?

try-working•56m ago

Hopefully MSFT would look at this as a do or die system, and go all in on improving the user and ownership experience. Will they? Not so sure.

jfim•50m ago

That's what they're working on, in theory, with Windows K2.

fhn•23m ago

I would never trust Microsoft. Their next drama is revoking Office 2019 perpetual licenses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRnno9VIZx0. It never ends with them because they know they have you by the balls.

__atx__•29m ago

The "gaming" take is a strange one indeed for an ARM platform. Hopefully they (Microsoft or Nvidia?) put some real effort into the translation layer. They claim modern AAA games, but it is possible they strongarmed the developers to make them an ARM build for a few select titles...

SilverElfin•15m ago

Yep. I noticed the press releases talk about all the partners they have. It seems like a desperate attempt to manufacture a consensus to invest in this new hardware instead of leaving it sort of abandoned like the other Windows ARM stuff. But the problem is that these attempts end up having a few very visible apps working on the architecture and others not actually doing anything substantial.

Sure the graphics capabilities are probably very good. But if you’re a game developer who has traditionally built on Windows on x86 chips, would you want to invest in this new chip or invest in making games for the Apple ecosystem?

andsoitis•8m ago

> But if you’re a game developer who has traditionally built on Windows on x86 chips, would you want to invest in this new chip or invest in making games for the Apple ecosystem?

Windows and the new chip. Higher developer productivity and higher chances of a substantial audience.

jqbd•1h ago

They made their own x86 CPU? Or was that part outsourced? Ok ARM MediaTek.

try-working•59m ago

ARM cpu made by MediaTek.

zamadatix•28m ago

But probably worth clarifying it's not a typical "MediaTek CPU" some might assume by that. It has Nvidia's customized ARM CPU implementation + their GPU.

boredatoms•59m ago

Is this just dgx spark, but a laptop?

pella•52m ago

yes, same chip

+ Windows

+ Screen

- ConnectX-7 Smart NIC

zer0zzz•3m ago

What about the desktop version? It seemed like it is not a dgx since it has the CPUs cores done by mediatek

cyanydeez•50m ago

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.

xyzzy123•44m ago

Or like a m4 max? This thing has <300GB/s vs the max with 550GB/s

All those CUDA cores in the sparks but they're starved for memory bandwidth.

I am still waiting for NVidia to release a system that legit beats 3090 maxxing for the home gamer...

moondev•25m ago

  Spark:
  OS: Windows/Ubuntu
  Mbw: 300GB/s
  Cuda cores: 6000
  GPU accelerated containers: yes


  M5 max:
  OS: macOS
  Mbw: 600GB/s
  Cuda cores: 0
  GPU accelerated containers: no

SilverElfin•44m ago

Is CUDA really a lead for long? Aren’t all the latest competitive approaches avoiding all the standard software stacks and writing deeply customized software that is very directly tied to whatever hardware they use?

And is it really a way to lock in people? With AI coding tools, isn’t it trivial to write software on top of CUDA and rewrite it to target some other hardware?

porphyra•29m ago

Strix halo's 8060S gpu is very weak, and is roughly equivalent to a 4060 laptop GPU, whereas GB10's gpu is equivalent to a desktop 5070. For LLM throughput, tok/s is similar due to bottleneck by memory bandwidth, but the GB10 has 3x faster prefill. People have also been able to squeeze out much better performance on GB10 using NVFP4 and other improvements in the months after the DGX Spark launch, so don't be misled by early lackluster benchmarks. For the RTX Spark, which also targets gaming and creative applications, the 3x faster GPU is quite nice.

renoir•49m ago

So basically Cerebras style?

trvz•12m ago

No.

KeplerBoy•8m ago

Not at all. This is a more like what Apple has been doing the past few years. A bunch of decent arm cores paired with a beefy integrated GPU.

zmk5•46m ago

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…

trvz•11m ago

They didn’t though. Rosetta 2.

SilverElfin•34m ago

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352693

EugeneOZ•5m ago

2 comments in total there

mastermage•32m ago

Is this finally Macbook Chip Efficiency coming to Windows or will it just be shittier compatibility for slightly better battery life?

zer0zzz•4m ago

I heard leaked geekbench putting it behind the m3, which is couple years old now.

All I care about is if I can get one of these for significantly less than a dgx and get Linux on it for some cuda Blackwell kerneling.

timpera•26m ago

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.

throwa356262•15m ago

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.

ma2kx•9m ago

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.

Skinney•5m ago

"Unified" means that it's shared between CPU and GPU, I believe.

But yes, it tends to be soldered on.

hgoel•3m ago

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.

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Nvidia RTX Spark

Comments

Chuwi Minibook X

Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

Decades of Effort Restore Steelhead and Salmon Passage on Alameda Creek

Rubin Tracks Skyscraper-Size Asteroids and Failed Supernovas

1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices

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The Genius of the Barn Owl's Feathers

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Bias Compounds, Variance Washes Out

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What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

Websites have a new way to spy on visitors: analyzing their SSD activity

Restartable Sequences

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Codex just found a "workaround" of not having sudo on my PC

Linux/M68k

New Beam Spring Keyboards

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Show HN: Streambed – Stream Postgres to Iceberg on S3, Supports Postgres Wire

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