[girvo]

> DGX Spark-alike

Probably wasn't clear enough if you don't know what that is already, apologies

It's an Asus Ascent GX10, which is a little mini PC with 128GB of LPDDR5X as shared memory for an Nvidia GB10 "Blackwell" (kind of, it's a long story) GPU and a MediaTek ARM CPU

[aftbit]

Ah yeah I saw that, I was just curious which particular mini-PC you were using. I was considering picking up one of the various AI Max 395 boxes before the RAMpocalypse but didn't take the plunge. Thanks for the response!

[girvo]

I heavily considered one of the AMD Strix Halo boxes, but part of the reason I wanted this was to learn CUDA :)

[sterlind]

pulls up chair

could you tell me the long story?

edit: or wait, is it quasi-Blackwell the way all DGX Sparks are quasi-Blackwell? like the actual silicon is different but it's sorta Blackwell-shaped?

[girvo]

Yeah exactly. Shader model 121 is different to SM 120 (consumer Blackwell) and is different again to data centre Blackwell SM100.

The promise of this chip was “write your code locally, then deploy to the same architecture in the data centre!”

Which is nonsense, because the GB10 is better described as “Hopper with Blackwell characteristics” IMO.

Still great hardware, especially for the price and learning. But we are only just starting to get the kernels written to take advantage of it, and mma.sync is sad compared to tcgen05