The real question to me is whether they're going to challenge Strix Halo with a high bandwidth GPU.
N1/N1X gpu is rumored to get near 5070-ish speeds! That would be a remarkable feat if true!! 5070 has 670 GB/s (via 192-bit, 1.75GHz GDDR7) memory to do what it does. That's more than twice the bandwidth Strix Halo and DGX Spark offer! That would be very interesting to see in a mobile chip.
Next gen Medusa Halo from AMD is going from quad to hex-channel DDR5: that'll be a bump. But still way short of a 5070's bandwidth, and still likely far more than a year out.
In all likelihood these rumors are probably ridiculously wrong. Nvidia is charging $4000 for DGX spark systems. It's unlikely that this is going to be a vastly more expensive system. It also seems improbable that it's going to be cheaper and vastly more performant. But for a little while longer, i can dream.
Going to be interesting to see if these machines will be capable of running anything else than Windows. Or if they are either so incompatible (no UEFI, etc.) or so locked down they can't run anything else.
Nvidia doesn't have a fantastic record for long term support on their SoCs. It usually ends up stranded on some outdated out-of-tree kernel. If they've shared the support task with Microsoft (and if MS remains institutionally capable of support at this point...), that's a reason for cautious optimism.
I don't think this is likely to truly pan out though. I can't imagine Nvidia making the kind of afffordances that would allow it to develop into a successful market segment. They're inevitably going to gatekeep documentation and aggressively encroach on their partners' margin like they always do.
I would prefer a GenBook RK3588 instead. At least I know RK3588 support is now in mainline uboot, kernel and mesa. Too bad it was abandoned. I guess too few people were interested.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 28.6 ms ] threadN1/N1X gpu is rumored to get near 5070-ish speeds! That would be a remarkable feat if true!! 5070 has 670 GB/s (via 192-bit, 1.75GHz GDDR7) memory to do what it does. That's more than twice the bandwidth Strix Halo and DGX Spark offer! That would be very interesting to see in a mobile chip.
Next gen Medusa Halo from AMD is going from quad to hex-channel DDR5: that'll be a bump. But still way short of a 5070's bandwidth, and still likely far more than a year out.
In all likelihood these rumors are probably ridiculously wrong. Nvidia is charging $4000 for DGX spark systems. It's unlikely that this is going to be a vastly more expensive system. It also seems improbable that it's going to be cheaper and vastly more performant. But for a little while longer, i can dream.
Being NVidia, it better deliver an experience that makes gaming worthwhile in performance of AAA titles.
I don't think this is likely to truly pan out though. I can't imagine Nvidia making the kind of afffordances that would allow it to develop into a successful market segment. They're inevitably going to gatekeep documentation and aggressively encroach on their partners' margin like they always do.