Comment by fredoralive
12 hours ago
From somewhere in the middle of Nvidia’s endless press waffle:
“The RTX Spark superchip features an NVIDIA Blackwell RTX GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores and fifth-generation Tensor Cores with FP4 precision, connected via the NVIDIA NVLink®-C2C chip-to-chip interconnect to a high-performance, 20-core NVIDIA Grace™ CPU.
MediaTek, a market leader in Arm-based system-on-a-chip designs, collaborated with NVIDIA on the custom CPU design, contributing to its best-in-class power efficiency, performance and connectivity.“
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-microsoft-windows-...
Nvidia Grace is an ARM core.
Sooooo they binned all their old DGX Spark crap to pawn on poor clueless consumers to try to be an ARM fighter and probably still fail miserably behind Apple Silicon and even likely older Qualcomm metal running Windows.
And Mediatek? Oof. I assume the SOC comes pre compromised out of the box.
> And Mediatek? Oof. I assume the SOC comes pre compromised out of the box.
If by compromised you mean “china bad”, mediatek is taiwanese not chinese. Same home as asus, asrock, tsmc, htc, acer, d link, adata, biostar, insyde, gskill, foxconn, realtek and many others. From the chip to bios in your pc probably.
If you mean quality, they make efficient and more powerful chipsets especially gpu wise compared to qualcomm. Most probably only know it from cheap chinese phones.
MediaTek used to supply a lot of lower-performance MIPS and ARM chips during 2010s. GP probably has that MediaTek == bad experience association. The actual chips weren't unreliable or horribly engineered, just slow, but people don't make a clear distinction there.
2 replies →
no, not calling "china bad", calling out all the SOCs they had some pretty glaring exploit holes on that a bunch of stupid OEMs kept shipping long after the holes were well known. i've also had a pretty bad time with a lot of their wifi chipsets on our networks, but hey.
1 reply →
That’s your interiorised racism talking, bro.
Mediatek used to make a lot of low-quality cpus for cheap and short-lifespanned products (eg: those cheap tablets that are essentially useless as soon as they hit the market)
It’s kind of irrelevant that they might be behind apple silicon because they’re targeting the non-apple, windows-using, section of the laptop market with a chip that can ostensibly be used for running AI models locally. Whether there’s much appetite for business users doing that remains to be seen.
The problem isn’t the chip. The problem is Windows and the level of Microsoft support going forward and right now Microsoft is preoccupied/distracted with Copilot.
That is the main problem that Qualcomm having currently with Microsoft.