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

This is something every company should make sure they have: an onboarding path.

Xeon Phi failed for a number of reasons, but one where it didn't need to fail was availability of software optimised for it. Now we have Xeons and EPYCs, and MI300C's with lots of efficient cores, but we could have been writing software tailored for those for 10 years now. Extracting performance from them would be a solved problem at this point. The same applies for Itanium - the very first thing Intel should have made sure it had was good Linux support. They could have it before the first silicon was released. Itaium was well supported for a while, but it's long dead by now.

Similarly, Sun has failed with SPARC, which also didn't have an easy onboarding path after they gave up on workstations. They did some things right: OpenSolaris ensured the OS remained relevant (still is, even if a bit niche), and looking the other way for x86 Solaris helps people to learn and train on it. Oracle cloud could, at least, offer it on cloud instances. Would be nice.

Now we see IBM doing the same - there is no reasonable entry level POWER machine that can compete in performance with a workstation-class x86. There is a small half-rack machine that can be mounted on a deskside case, and that's it. I don't know of any company that's planning to deploy new systems on AIX (much less IBMi, which is also POWER), or even for Linux on POWER, because it's just too easy to build it on other, competing platforms. You can get AIX, IBMi and even IBMz cloud instances from IBM cloud, but it's not easy (and I never found a "from-zero-to-ssh-or-5250-or-3270" tutorial for them). I wonder if it's even possible. You can get Linux on Z instances, but there doesn't seem to be a way to get Linux on POWER. At least not from them (several HPC research labs still offer those).

1000% all these ai hardware companies will fail if they don't have this. You must have a cheap way to experiment and develop. Even if you want to only sell a $30000 datacenter card you still need a very low cost way to play.

Sad to see big companies like intel and amd don't understand this but they've never come to terms with the fact that software killed the hardware star

> Sad to see big companies like intel and amd don't understand this

And it's not like they were never bitten (Intel has) by this before.

Isn’t the cloud GPU market covering this? I can run a model for $2/hr, or get a 8xH100 if I need to play with something bigger.

It really mystifies me that Intel AMD and other hardware companies obviously Nvidia in this case Don't either have a consortium or each have their own in-house Linux distribution with excellent support.

Windows has always been a barrier to hardware feature adoption to Intel. You had to wait 2 to 3 years, sometimes longer, for Windows to get around us providing hardware support.

Any OS optimizations in Windows you had to go through Microsoft. So say you added some instructions custom silicon or whatever to speed up Enterprise databases, provide high-speed networking that needed some special kernel features, etc, there was always Microsoft being in the way.

Not just in the drag the feet communication. Getting the tech people a line problem.

Microsoft will look at every single change. It did as to whether or not it would challenge their Monopoly whether or not it was in their business interest whether or not it kept you as the hardware and a subservient role.

People tend to limit their usage when it's time-billed. You need some sort of desktop computer anyway, so, if you spend the 3K this one costs, you have unlimited time of Nvidia cloud software. When you need to run on bigger metal, then you pay $2/hour.

I have the skills to write efficient CUDA kernels, but $2/hr is 10% of my salary, so no way I'm renting any H100s. The electricity price for my computer is already painful enough as is. I am sure there are many eastern European developers who are more skilled and get paid even less. This is a huge waste of resources all due to NVIDIA's artificial market segmentation. Or maybe I am just cranky because I want more VRAM for cheap.

From the consumer perspective, it seems that MSFT has provided scheduler changes fairly rapidly for CPU changes, like X3D, P/e cores, etc. At least within a couple of months, if not at release.

Amd/Intel work directly with Microsoft for shipping new silicon that would otherwise require it.

Raptor Computing provides POWER9 workstations. They're not cheap, still use last-gen hardware (DDR4/PCIe 4 ... and POWER9 itself) but they're out there.

https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html

Well, Intel management is very good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

Intel does have https://www.clearlinux.org/

At least they don’t suffer from a lack of onboarding paths for x86, and it seems they are doing a nice job with their dGPUs.

Still unforgivable that their new CPUs hit the market without excellent Linux support.

It kind of defeats the purpose of an onboarding platform if it’s more expensive than the one you think of moving away from.

IBM should see some entry-level products as loss leaders.

> From the consumer perspective, it seems that MSFT has provided scheduler changes fairly rapidly

Now they have some competition. This is relatively new, and Satya Nadella reshaped the company because of that.

This has 128GB of unified memory. A similarly configured Mac Studio costs almost twice as much, and I'm not sure the GPU is on the same league (software support wise, it isn't, but that's fixable).

A real shame it's not running mainline Linux - I don't like their distro based on Ubuntu LTS.

They're not offering POWER10 either because IBM closed the firmware again. Stupid move.

There were Phi cards, but they were pricey and power hungry (at the time, now current GPU cards probably meet or exceed the Phi card's power consumption) for plugging into your home PC. A few years back there was a big fire sale on Phi cards - you could pick one up for like $200. But by then nobody cared.

3k is still very steep for anyone not on a silicon valley like salary.

Imagine if they were sold at cost in the beginning. Also, think about having one as the only CPU rather than a card.

Raptor's value proposition is a 100% free and open platform, from the firmware and up, but, if they were willing to compromise on that, they'd be able to launch a POWER10 box.

Not sure it'd competitive in price with other workstation class machines. I don't know how expensive IBM's S1012 desk side is, but with only 64 threads, it'd be a meh workstation.

$4,799 for an M2 Ultra with 128GB of RAM, so not quite twice as much. I'm not sure what the benchmark comparison would be. $5,799 if you want an extra 16 GPU cores (60 vs 76).

We'll need to look into benchmarks when the numbers come out. Software support is also important, and a Mac will not help you that much if you are targeting CUDA.

I have to agree the desktop experience of the Mac is great, on par with the best Linuxes out there.

A lot of models are optimized for metal already, especially lamma, deepseek, and qwen. You are still taking a hit but there wasn't an alternative solution for getting that much vram in a less than $5k before this NVIDIA project came out. Will definitely look at it closely if it isn't just vaporware.

Yes. Most people make do with a generic desktop and an Nvidia GPU. What makes this machine attractive is the beefy GPU and the full Nvidia support for the whole AI stack.

They cant walk back now without some major backlash.

The one thing I wonder is noise. That box is awfully small for the amount of compute it packs, and high-end Mac Studios are 50% heatsink. There isn’t much space in this box for a silent fan.