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Comment by tonoto

7 hours ago

What is this product anyway? Is it a general purpose CPU or is it specifically designed for MS Windows? Nvidia stepping back from the open source?

"Introducing the NVIDIA RTX Spark™ Superchip. The fusion of NVIDIA AI and RTX graphics in a single chip redefines Windows PCs and delivers amazing creating, AI development, and gaming—on the slimmest, most beautiful RTX laptops ever and small, ultra-efficient desktops."

It’s nivdia attempting to compete with Apple’s M-series

  • Its nvidia attempt to gain additional market share and expected as well. If the whole ecosystem is around nvidia and its the easiest way of running stuff, Nvidia offering more enterprise infrastrcuture allows companies to just buy directly nvidia.

    Nvidia is also very very rich and pushes the boundaries of stuff. They stoped waiting for industry standards. You can see this in there network stuff. All nvidia.

    Next logical step (at least now, not something i thought about) was there CPU for their GPU racks/clusters/systems.

    Now they have everything anyway, RTX Spark is just logical.

    I don't think its specificly targeted at Apple at all.

    Apple has like 10-15% market share and just because some IT nerds buy themselves a mac mini doesn't mean much.

    Plenty of them actually just run openclaw without local models. Something which surprised me quite a lot.

    But i have two 4090 at home. They consume a lot of power and i had to research the proper Mainboardmodel and had to mod one 4090 to use water cooling because they run too hot.

    There Spark setup was at 3k, way to expensive for normal people. If they can get this down and sell more, great for their ecosystem (strengthening it) and getting more money from people.

    It does surprise me though that they have enough capacity for this chip and not just putting everyting in Rubin but perhaps the build out has slowed down a little or they start to diverse already for economic savety

  • All the news articles in my feed mentioned Nvidia reinventing personal computing which is laughable given the specs are worse than the m series. I’m guessing they saw how well Apple devices were selling and rushed to get something similar out so they can ride the hype train and have something to fall back on if ai DC spend slows down.

    • There's a lot of companies trying to support datacenter systems like GH and Rubin that don't have dev hardware remotely resembling it. M-series isn't a good option, speaking from the personal experience of currently using one for this exact purpose.

I wouldn't say it's Nvidia stepping back from open source... if anything this is doubling down on it, as one of the selling points of this is the 128GB of unified memory which will allow for hosting local models (i.e, nvidia's new open model they just released). I guess it's pretty cool, I'm a big supporter of local LLMs/open weight models so seems enticing to me, although I'm not sure this will be super applicable to a lot of regular consumers. Seems like a pretty niche product.