Nvidia Challenges Apple Silicon With New RTX Spark PC Chip

[marte91]

Right. I'll go tell the building designers I work for that they're designing houses with toys, and that I'm doing thermal simulations and drafting on a toy.

They already know, the highest spec mac studio only support 10Gb ethernet, not even 25Gb ethernet, if you have to transfer any kind of big files your only choice is to wait for the slow network transfer at 10Gb ethernet, that's only one limitation.

 

[Luftkopf]

They already know, the highest spec mac studio only support 10Gb ethernet, not even 25Gb ethernet, if you have to transfer any kind of big files your only choice is to wait for the slow network transfer at 10Gb ethernet, that's only one limitation.

Great. That's completely irrelevant to me, and to the designers I work for. I guess we're irrelevant too. It only counts if you're Fortune 500 right?

 

[marte91]

Great. That's completely irrelevant to me, and to the designers I work for. I guess we're irrelevant too. It only counts if you're Fortune 500 right?

But not to the Industry in general, that just validates my early comments about Macs being Niche Toys, since is irrelevant to you, but is the benchmark that all professional / enterprise hardware is Judged by.

 

[Luftkopf]

But not to the Industry in general, that just validates my early comments about Macs being Niche Toys, since is irrelevant to you, but is the benchmark that all professional / enterprise hardware is Judged by.

Right. The only thing that matters is the absolute top end of town. If it's not relevant to the top 1%, it's an irrelevant toy.

Got it.

 

[marte91]

Right. The only thing that matters is the absolute top end of town. If it's not relevant to the top 1%, it's an irrelevant toy.

Got it.

You feel whatever way you want, I'm just stating the facts of the market, the enterprise market is not the top 1%, It is the market by what everything gets benchmarked, without the enterprise side of the market we will not have SSD's, 10Gb ethernet, etc., Most advancements are first deployed on the enterprise side and then gets trickle down to the home users.

 

[bombardier10]

One of the first computers with ARM processors: the Odroid XU4. A precursor to Silicon’s Mac computers. Released in 2015. I still use one as a server and the other for browsing the internet. Os sytem is Linux and Android too . Active manufacturer support until 2024. The average price is $50 😃

 

[darkblu]

Then which 500 company uses macs exclusively, not mom and pop shop but any big enterprise company?
None, apple abandoned the enterprise market after the failed MAC server.

So you decided to double down on the silliness? Sure, I'll play along for the fun of it.

(protip: no large company uses name-your-brand "exclusively", except perhaps AAPL using (mostly) macs, DELL using (mostly) dells, etc.)

I'm not trying to offend anyone, but reality is reality, apple even let Google take the education market that once was theirs,

No offense taken, not an apple employee here.

The edu market is the diametrically opposite to the pro market, if we considered the consumer market being some mid ground. The margins in the edu market are ungodly low. Case in point: neo will not set a foot into the edu door. Neo will likely reach as low as college/university stratum edu-wise, but forget about seeing neo taking over high schools. Actually, neo is one of apple's very few proper consumer PCs, possibly along with the base-sku mini. If anything, apple have been trying lately to set a solid foot into the consumer door. Coming from *you guess it* the pro market.

apple has been happy to stay as niche company, because that way they can charge a premium per device, which is fine their choice, but to come and claim somehow that MACS are superior to everything else is just silly

Can you quote me on that? What I said was that Apple sells mostly professional PCs (aka Macs; all their other hw segments non-withstanding here). How you jumped to 'superior to everything' is a mystery to me. Heck, I believe it was you (?) earlier in this thread who noted that apple never really bothered investing into a games ecosystem on the mac. If apple were properly targeting the consumer market with the mac then games would've been a priority, not an afterthought (hint: the way they are a priority on ios). Corporations don't give a darn if employees can play minecraft on their company-issued hw, and neither do pros.

they have their use the same as any other computing device being Linux or windows, to me is about choosing the right tool for the job, no feelings or opinions involved,

Newsflash: macs are the "right tool for the job" for a good part of the corporate world (see Gemini quote above).

i own multiple IOS devices because they make sense for my usage. they have definitively better and or more capable devices in the android side, but i don't like their data privacy posture, that's it, for example i consider Linux far superior than windows and MAC os for certain things, but not as a Home user Desktop os, the average home user doesn't care if Wayland is running with AMD (ATI) open source drivers or NVIDIA proprietary (Closed Source) drivers, they just care that they can run their software, watch Netflix or run their web browser, they don't care if is Chrome, fire fox or safari.

Cool, I guess.

 

[BSDnostalgia]

Alex Ziskind has a preview of the RTX Spark that mentions that nVidia's ConnectX-7 NIC costs around $1500.

I believe that is about right. And, when I looked up the specs, that particular NIC is going to add 25W also. But, the optical or coax links are not very expensive and off-the-shelf. So, if someone did build the NIC into a mid-level product, it wouldn't cost that much to plug it in.

I see the market for this to be mid-level, in the $10-$20K professional market, where high-end Studios are already priced. But, yes, not at the pro-sumer desktop. For that, 10Gbps ethernet will have to suffice for now.

 

[BSDnostalgia]

I don't recall if anyone mentioned this, but, there is a version of the Nvidia Linux Spark for sale via the Walmart website (!) This was off a link from the link above, I think. Spark
$4679.00, for 128GB RAM w/ 4TB NVMe storage. I guess I didn't know Walmart was in this business.

I wonder if there are any games available for the Nvidia DGX Spark? The specs say it has HDMI to connect to a monitor.

 

[splifingate]

I don't recall if anyone mentioned this, but, there is a version of the Nvidia Linux Spark for sale via the Walmart website (!) This was off a link from the link above, I think. Spark
$4679.00, for 128GB RAM w/ 4TB NVMe storage. I guess I didn't know Walmart was in this business.

I wonder if there are any games available for the Nvidia DGX Spark? The specs say it has HDMI to connect to a monitor.

Walmart dot com has basically morphed into a franken-AMZN/Bay middleman.

The Spark basically provides a full Ubuntu experience, with perks (think of DGX OS as "Red with Green highlights").

I haven't tried any games on it.

When Microsoft finally gets a decent arm port working (and Steam starts, er, steaming), I imagine the sky rim will be no limit 🤷‍♂️

 

[BSDnostalgia]

The Spark basically provides a full Ubuntu experience, with perks (think of DGX OS as "Red with Green highlights").

I haven't tried any games on it.

When Microsoft finally gets a decent arm port working (and Steam starts, er, steaming), I imagine the sky rim will be no limit 🤷‍♂️

Darn. It is out of my price range for something that would be, to me, a toy. But, I would love to play with one. I've wondered for years why someone didn't do exactly this architecture. And, now, they've done it! I hope they fully develop the software environment for a wide range of apps.

AMD had an ARM license for years but never did anything like this. Too bad. Too committed to beating Intel at high-end x86. But, maybe now that Nvidia is doing it, I hope that AMD will feel threatened and respond. I would love to see the Nvidia/AMD competition move into this area as well. Goodbye x86.

 

[splifingate]

Darn. It is out of my price range for something that would be, to me, a toy. But, I would love to play with one. I've wondered for years why someone didn't do exactly this architecture. And, now, they've done it! I hope they fully develop the software environment for a wide range of apps.

AMD had an ARM license for years but never did anything like this. Too bad. Too committed to beating Intel at high-end x86. But, maybe now that Nvidia is doing it, I hope that AMD will feel threatened and respond. I would love to see the Nvidia/AMD competition move into this area as well. Goodbye x86.

I believe that AMD accomplished this with the Strix, albeit with a less-supported GPU.

It's all in the software, and getting devs to invest their time with HIP and ROCM is a major hurdle.

I left Intel a long while ago.

Just compiled Linux 7.1.0 on my AM5 Epyc, and (IIRC) it took just under two minutes. Module compile was 2x. CPU never broke 51C.

As for the DGX: it's been sitting here un-powered for over two months . . . not quite ready (read: "I just don't yet know how") to put it into Production 😱

 

[BSDnostalgia]

I believe that AMD accomplished this with the Strix, albeit with a less-supported GPU.

I did not know that.

I checked it out. Pretty interesting, similar as you said, although -- x86. I would love to see AMD come out with a new version of that box with a ~16 core ARM that performs like a ~16 core EPYC.

It's all in the software, and getting devs to invest their time with HIP and ROCM is a major hurdle.

Yes. These boxes are within budget for a lot of orgs. I would love to see people jump in.

Just compiled Linux 7.1.0 on my AM5 Epyc, and (IIRC) it took just under two minutes. Module compile was 2x. CPU never broke 51C.

How many cores/threads on that particular model?

On the Nividia v AMD front, there is an article that directly compares the Nvidia and AMD systems (they didn't include Apple Studio):

Strix-Halo v Spark

 

[splifingate]

I did not know that.

I checked it out. Pretty interesting, similar as you said, although -- x86. I would love to see AMD come out with a new version of that box with a ~16 core ARM that performs like a ~16 core EPYC.

Yes. These boxes are within budget for a lot of orgs. I would love to see people jump in.

How many cores/threads on that particular model?

On the Nividia v AMD front, there is an article that directly compares the Nvidia and AMD systems (they didn't include Apple Studio):

Strix-Halo v Spark

All this stuff is transitioning faster than Middle East politics!

I have the 4565P CPU in my comp . . . 16cores, with 32 threads @5.1GHz

Strix can be comparable in processing power, but they are more-aligned to power savings (my AM5 system hovers around 100W on a basic desktop login).

My M2 Max hovers around 45W all-flags-flying.

In the process of getting my two AMD R9700's working (hopefully together), those who have are reporting that 2xR9700 ~= 1xSpark (and 4xR9700 ~= 2x Spark).

I'm not there, yet, and I would otherwise become frustrated if not for the realization that there will probably be no new reasonably-priced introductions to the Plebeian Compute Market in the next two years, I feel safe to indulge 😉

 

[Omega Mac]

Agreed. Making little AI niche's in hardware distributed across consumer devices, all of which are attached to the internet – what could possibly go wrong?

The idea that AI agents should control devices, even with nominal consent, is naive and dangerous. If local devices can truly run AI with billions of free parameters, the people designing the AI, let alone the consumers, will have no hope of understanding how the agents work.

Bottom line no one fundamentally knows how the Ai actually works.

Now apply legal world court of law assessment, how can you stand over a teh that fundamentally is not even toady understood by the engineers.

I have not seen this fact change, has it?

Therefore I would say it is at least legally required to have a systemic kill switch.

 

[Omega Mac]

On one hand Linux is so important and on the other hand it attracts a kind of entitled snob who comes from wealth but snears at everyone who pays for apps or runs a commercial software company.

I think these type of people have a kind of self guilt complex because they can live on dad’s money. Instead of getting a job they grow dreadlocks, wear logos, can’t shut up about Linux taking over the world and then go wave a Ba’ath party flag in public. There’s actually one such rich kid who left his famous American family and now lives in Ireland funding anti western extremists with his dad’s money.

😂 It's like cartoon/carboard cut outs, who are the parents or who is the kid, are they famous?

 

[Omega Mac]

The fact that they only have a 9.5 market share of pc overall in the world, if it was the best at everything, everyone will be buying Macs, so come down from the clouds and accept reality.

10% of a market can set the price (and tone) for the rest, as you can see the market behaves exactly like that, following Apple moves.

 

[Omega Mac]

AI is all the rage, and Nvidia is making billions on it, so, I'm not surprised they are gushing about that side of it. I hope that doesn't confuse people about the architectural significance.

Nvidia is starting from the GPU architecture, and, melding the fast ARM CPU into it. This is, finally, breaking the artificial barrier between fast CPU and fast Nvidia dGPU.

Yes, Apple already did it with their own M-series, but, hasn't (yet) scaled the GPU side all the way up. This will be a challenge to Apple.

But, the real threat is to x86. x86 was obsolete the day it was born, and yet, still lives on. This will likely finally kill it. (A long slow death of course. But, x86-based quarterly profits will sag first.) Intel and AMD had better figure out how to join the party.

🤗 What if Apple bought out Intel, buy the whole Fab infrastructure, convert to your product over time, make memory etc.

Intel market cap is around 600+ million Apple's over 4 Trillion.

AMD is over 800 billion market cap, so Intel is the bargain and stranger things have happened?

 

[darkblu]

Darn. It is out of my price range for something that would be, to me, a toy. But, I would love to play with one. I've wondered for years why someone didn't do exactly this architecture. And, now, they've done it! I hope they fully develop the software environment for a wide range of apps.

AMD had an ARM license for years but never did anything like this. Too bad. Too committed to beating Intel at high-end x86. But, maybe now that Nvidia is doing it, I hope that AMD will feel threatened and respond. I would love to see the Nvidia/AMD competition move into this area as well. Goodbye x86.

AMD did something like that back in the early arm64 days. Check out AMD’s project Seattle.

 

[BSDnostalgia]

AMD did something like that back in the early arm64 days. Check out AMD’s project Seattle.

AMD dropped that before the ink was dry on it. I have no idea why. But, I'm sure Wall Street was happy about it. Maybe they were right -- it took another few years for everything to emerge, and, in a world where only next quarter's results matter, it would have taken too long.