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

(techcrunch.com)
623 points magicalhippo | 16 comments | 07 Jan 25 04:14 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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Abishek_Muthian ◴[07 Jan 25 14:59 UTC] No.42623030[source]▶
I'm looking at my Jetson Nano in the corner which is fulfilling its post-retirement role as a paper weight because Nvidia abandoned it in 4 years.

Nvidia Jetson Nano, A SBC for "AI" debuted with already aging custom Ubuntu 18.04 and when 18.04 went EOL, Nvidia abandoned it completely without any further updates to its proprietary jet-pack or drivers and without them all of Machine Learning stack like CUDA, Pytorch etc. became useless.

I'll never buy a SBC from Nvidia unless all the SW support is up-streamed to Linux kernel.

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1. lolinder ◴[07 Jan 25 15:36 UTC] No.42623475[source]▶
This is a very important point.

In general, Nvidia's relationship with Linux has been... complicated. On the one hand, at least they offer drivers for it. On the other, I have found few more reliable ways to irreparably break a Linux installation than trying to install or upgrade those drivers. They don't seem to prioritize it as a first class citizen, more just tolerate it the bare minimum required to claim it works.

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2. stabbles ◴[07 Jan 25 15:39 UTC] No.42623519[source]▶
Now that the majority of their revenue is from data centers instead of Windows gaming PCs, you'd think their relationship with Linux should improve or already has.
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3. lolinder ◴[07 Jan 25 15:41 UTC] No.42623558[source]▶
It's possible. I haven't had a system completely destroyed by Nvidia in the last few years, but I've been assuming that's because I've gotten in the habit of just not touching it once I get it working...
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4. pplonski86 ◴[07 Jan 25 18:27 UTC] No.42625615{3}[source]▶
I got similar experience. I really prefer switch CUDA version with whole PC machine. What is more, the speed and memory of hardware improves quickly in time as well.
5. sangnoir ◴[07 Jan 25 18:37 UTC] No.42625732[source]▶
Nvidia segments its big iron AI hardware from the consumer/prosumer segment. They do this by forbidding the use of GeForce drivers in datacenters[1]. All that to say, it is possible for the H100 to to have excellent Linux support, while support for the 4090 is awful.

1. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-updates-ge...

6. dotancohen ◴[07 Jan 25 18:45 UTC] No.42625802[source]▶

  > Nvidia's relationship with Linux has been... complicated.
For those unfamiliar with Linus Torvalds' two-word opinion of Nvidia:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OF_5EKNX0Eg

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7. godelski ◴[07 Jan 25 19:16 UTC] No.42626162{3}[source]▶
I update drivers regularly. I've only had one display failure and was solved by a simple rollback. To be a bit fair (:/) it was specifically a combination of new beta driver and a newer kernel. It's definitely improved a ton since 10 years ago I just would not update them except very carefully.
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8. robhlt ◴[07 Jan 25 19:18 UTC] No.42626187[source]▶
They have been making real improvements the last few years. Most of their proprietary driver code is in firmware now, and the kernel driver is open-source[1] (the userland-side is still closed though).

They've also significantly improved support for wayland and stopped trying to force eglstreams on the community. Wayland+nvidia works quite well now, especially after they added explicit sync support.

1. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/

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9. KerrAvon ◴[07 Jan 25 19:37 UTC] No.42626427{3}[source]▶
I have been having a fine time with a 3080 on recent Arch, FWIW.

HDR support is still painful, but that seems to be a Linux problem, not specific to Nvidia.

10. FuriouslyAdrift ◴[07 Jan 25 19:40 UTC] No.42626473[source]▶
The Digits device runs the same nVidia DGX OS (nVidia custom Ubuntu distro) that they run on their cloud infra.
11. jimmySixDOF ◴[07 Jan 25 21:10 UTC] No.42627514{3}[source]▶
>complicated

... as in remember the time a ransomware hacker outfit demanded they release the drivers or else .....

https://www.webpronews.com/open-source-drivers-or-else-nvidi...

12. lolinder ◴[07 Jan 25 21:47 UTC] No.42627990{4}[source]▶
I've bricked multiple systems just running apt install on the Nvidia drivers. I have no idea how, but I run the installation, everything works fine, and then when I reboot I can't even boot.

That was years ago, but it happened multiple times and I've been very cautious ever since.

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13. andirk ◴[08 Jan 25 15:55 UTC] No.42635475[source]▶
Wow. Torvalds' distaste for Nvidia from that, albeit 12 year old, clip leaves little to the imagination. Re: gaming GPUs, Windows is their main OS, but is that the main reason why Huang only mentioned Windows in his CES 2025 keynote? Their gaming chips are a small portion of the company now. But they want to focus dev on Windows??
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14. rbanffy ◴[08 Jan 25 16:31 UTC] No.42635857{3}[source]▶
Nvidia has its own Linux distribution, DGX OS, based on Ubuntu LTS, but installing other Linux distros on machines with Nvidia GPUs is less than ideal.
15. Vilian ◴[08 Jan 25 19:48 UTC] No.42637766{3}[source]▶
Because red hat announced that next RHEl is going tone Wayland only, that why they fixed all that you said, they don't care about users, only servers
16. godelski ◴[08 Jan 25 20:53 UTC] No.42638324{5}[source]▶
Interesting. I've never had that issue (~15 years experience) but I always had CPUs with graphics drivers. Do you think that might be it? The danger zone was always at `startx` and never before. (I still buy CPUs with graphics drivers because I think it is always good to have a fallback and hey, sometimes I want to sacrifice graphics for GPU compute :)