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Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

(techcrunch.com)
623 points magicalhippo | 3 comments | 07 Jan 25 04:14 UTC | HN request time: 0.721s | source
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narrator ◴[07 Jan 25 04:49 UTC] No.42619363[source]▶
Nvidia releases a Linux desktop supercomputer that's better price/performance wise than anything Wintel is doing and their whole new software stack will only run on WSL2. They aren't porting to Win32. Wow, it may actually be the year of Linux on the Desktop.
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sliken ◴[07 Jan 25 05:36 UTC] No.42619598[source]▶
Not sure how to judge better price/perf. I wouldn't expect 20 Neoverse N2 cores to do particularly well vs 16 zen5 cores. The GPU side looks promising, but they aren't mentioning memory bandwidth, configuration, spec, or performance.

Did see vague claims of "starting at $3k", max 4TB nvme, and max 128GB ram.

I'd expect AMD Strix Halo (AI Max plus 395) to be reasonably competitive.

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1. z4y5f3 ◴[07 Jan 25 05:49 UTC] No.42619674[source]▶
NVIDIA is likely citing 1 PFlops at FP 4 sparse (they did this for GB200), so that is 128 TFlops BF16 dense, or 2/3 of what RTX 4090 is capable of. I would put the memory bandwidth at 546 GBps, using the same 512 bit LPDDR5X 8533 Mbps as Apple M4 max.
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2. gardnr ◴[07 Jan 25 08:19 UTC] No.42620444[source]▶
Based on your evaluation, it sounds like it will run inference at speed similar to an M4 Max and also allow "startups" to experiment with fine tuning larger models or larger context windows.

It's the best "dev board" setup I've seen so far. It might be part of their larger commercial plan but it definitely hits the sweet spot for the home enthusiast who have been pleading for more VRAM.

3. aparashk ◴[09 Jan 25 05:13 UTC] No.42641848[source]▶
I can't see how this will work in terms of a TDP. 2/3 of the 4090 power would be several times more power than can be effectively cooled in the physical form factor of an Apple Mini. Either there is severe downclocking happening under full throttle, or NVIDIA have come up with more low power design mojo than Apple has been able to muster for the M4 Max.