[llm_nerd]

Does this person know that this is the same GB chip in the DGX Spark? It isn't some proposed thing, it's a chip loads of people have on their desk right now, and there are endless benchmarks of it.

Decent single core (a long ways from Apple level, but decent), but it makes up for it in cores to provide M5 level performance, CPU wise. Memory bandwidth it is kind of starved, at 1/6th many GPUs.

They got Microsoft to customize Windows for the RTX Spark, and will likely have to brutally throttle it when running as a laptop (it's literally a 140W TDP chip), and that's neat. It's going to be a very expensive laptop.

[SwtCyber]

This is probably the better way to frame it: not "Nvidia is proposing a new CPU system" but "Nvidia is trying to move an existing GB/Spark-class platform into a Windows PC form factor"

[Apreche]

I heard the memory bandwidth is not just slower than on a GPU, as expected, but is significantly slower than Apple’s unified memory.

[MrBuddyCasino]

CPU/GPU is decent (800 GB or so), memory is slowish (300GB or so). Some Apple M are slower, some are faster.

[dagmx]

Where did you get those numbers from?

DGX Spark has a maximum of 273 GB/s bandwidth in ideal scenarios (hard to reach)

That puts it between an M5 (153) and M5 Pro (307)

[MrBuddyCasino]

The 900 GB/s is from the NVLink-C2C interconnect, if you were wondering about that. They quote "up to 900 GB/s of bidirectional bandwidth between GPU and CPU".

Mind you thats not to/from memory, which indeed only has 273 GB/s.

[dagmx]

Ah I see. But the only C2C equivalent on the Apple side is the UltraFusion which is 2.5TB/s if I recall correctly.

[MrBuddyCasino]

Yes its not an "Apple M killer" at all. Also, the available official performance numbers are partially overstated (1 Petaflop is only possible for sparse FP4 models, "in theory").

Perhaps a sobering rule of thumb: if it was actually useful, you couldn't buy them because someone would scoop them all up to shove them in a DC and make money with it.

[MrBuddyCasino]

Plus John Carmack has reviewed it, he was not amazed.