47 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 67.9 ms ] thread
Can it run Crysis?
Is this worth getting vs AMD?
suppose 1/3rd of memory is used to host a teacher network, and 2/3rds of memory is used to host a student network, how long would knowledge distillation typically take?
They will meet at 18:47 on tuesday evening.
Am I missing something or does the comparably priced (technically cheaper) Jetson Thor have double the PFLOPs of the Spark with the same memory capacity and similar bandwidth?
It's a bit disingenuous to claim 1 PFLOPs without making clear that's for FP4 (with "structured sparsity"?)
I’m not in this space, so I don’t know what’s normal, but I guess I’m a little surprised to see only 10 gig Ethernet for high speed connectivity.

Yeah, it’s miles better than WiFi. But if there was something I’d think maybe benefit from Thunderbolt this would’ve been it.

The ability to transfer large models or datasets that way just seems like it would be much faster and a real win for some customers.

Is this the $3500 one?
I was considering getting an RTX 5090 to run inference on some LLM models, but now I’m wondering if it’s worth paying an extra $2K for this option instead
Power consumption : TBD

?? this seems more than a little disingenuous...

It'll be stunted in some way - Nvidia always holds back some crucial feature that you need, to push you up to the next highest priced product line.
While a completely different price point, I have a Jetson Orin Nano. Some people forget the kernels are more or less set in stone for product like these. I could rebuild my own Jetpack kernel but it’s not that straight forward to update something like CUDA or any other module. Unless you’re a business where your product relies on this hardware, I find it hard to buy this for consumer applications.
The mainstream options seem to be

Ryzen AI Max 395+, ~120 tops (fp8?), 128GB RAM, $1999

Nvidia DGX Spark, ~1000 tops fp4, 128GB RAM, $3999

Mac Studio max spec, ~120 tflops (fp16?), 512GB RAM, 3x bandwidth, $9499

DGX Spark appears to potentially offer the most token per second, but less useful/value as everyday pc.

You should add memory bandwidth to your comparison, as it's usually the bottleneck in terms of tps (at least for token generation, prompt processing is a different story).
The RAM bandwidth is so slow on this that you can barely train or do inference or do anything on it. I think the only use case they have in mind for this is fine tuning pretrained models.
(comment deleted)
(comment deleted)
(comment deleted)
(comment deleted)
FP4-sparse (TFLOPS) | Price | $/TF4s

5090: 3352 | 1999 | 0.60

Thor: 2070 | 3499 | 1.69

Spark: 1000 | 3999 | 4.00

____________

FP8-dense (TFLOPS) | Price | $/TF8d (4090s have no FP4)

4090 : 661 | 1599 | 2.42

4090 Laptop: 343 | vary | -

____________

Geekbench 6 (compute score) | Price | $/100k

4090: 317800 | 1599 | 503

5090: 387800 | 1999 | 516

M4 Max: 180700 | 1999 | 1106

M3 Ultra: 259700 | 3999 | 1540

____________

Apple NPU TOPS (not GPU-comparable)

M4 Max: 38

M3 Ultra: 36

(comment deleted)
What did I miss? This was revealed in May - I don’t see anything new in that link since it was revealed.
Most people are missing the point. LLMs are not the be all end all of AI.

Even if you were to say memory bandwidth was the problem, there is no consumer grade GPU that can run any SoTA LLM, no matter what you'd have to settle for a more mediocre model.

Outside of LLMs, 256 GB/s is not as much of an issue and many people have dealt with less bandwidth for real world use cases.

Dunno, doesn't seem that good to me. Granted, I recognize the pace of advancement, but fwiw at present time.. yeah.

I'd rather just get an M3 Ultra. Have an M2 Ultra on the desk, and an M3 Ultra sitting on the desk waiting to be opened. Might need to sell it and shell out the cash for the max ram option. Pricey, but seems worthwhile.

Now we need a threeway benchmark between this DGX Spark, a maxed out AMD Strix* and the Mac 512GB.