Comment by quatonion
8 hours ago
A Ryzen 9 laptop with 24GB of RAM and a 5070 is £1200. This thing better be dirt cheap. Basically add the price of the RAM, and deduct the price of having to use ARM and being forced into a Windows ecosystem. So what's that total? £1500 to £2000 depending on who you ask? Who is this for? Not gamers, not average Windows users, not professional developers or content creators.
Thing is, hardly any games are optimized for ARM. And no serious AI development occurs on Windows.
I understand that you want multiple models running concurrently, but then 128GB is starting to look cramped.
It's a bold move that goes one to one against Apple and AMD Strix Halo.
I'm looking at it and thinking, if it can run Linux at a fair price it could be great.
I'm curious. I am thinking, what does a non developer buy this thing, take it home, and do with it.
What does the unboxing and first 24 hours look like?
A mixture of emotions somewhere between thinking you are living in the future, and frustration at not actually being able to do much.
The target audience seems like wealthy early adopters, but that is about it.
I guess we shall see.
> but then 128GB is starting to look cramped.
Indeed. This NVIDIA CPU will have a lifetime overlapping with the successor of Strix Halo, which has been announced recently and which increases the maximum amount of DRAM to 192 GB.
The Strix Halo CPU has better multi-threaded performance than this, so the only advantage of NVIDIA is that the top variants will have a bigger GPU than Strix Halo and its successor, but I assume that the variants with a bigger GPU will also be much more expensive.
An M5 pro max with 128gb of RAM is $5200 so I’d expect some kind of price in that range.
I imagine it’s for AI researchers, professionals who work with models. Software engineers who want local models instead of cloud models.
To be honest, I don’t think it’ll be very popular with those demographics. But I think a company like Microsoft investing in local AI is a good thing.
Look to be disappointed Microsoft is all in on Copilot AI after having spent billions of dollars. It is boom or bust for Satya Nadella.