[nimish]

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

[theptip]

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.

[rbanffy]

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.

[bmicraft]

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

[rbanffy]

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.

[johndough]

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.

[rbanffy]

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.

[seanmcdirmid]

$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).

[rbanffy]

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.

[seanmcdirmid]

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.

[rbanffy]

> 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.

[nimish]

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

[the_panopticon]

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

[rbanffy]

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.