No thunderbolt is a big no for me. Its one of the greatest feature of MacbookPro that makes it dockable and expandable as a desktop with a good thunderbolt dock.
Some competition for Apple in this space and competition for Intel and AMD is great.
But I really do question how well Windows on Arm is really going to work out long term.
For Apple it worked because they were able to force the issue. If you wanted a new Mac it was going to be Arm and we all knew eventually (this year or is it next year?) Intel support would drop. Over time we have seen M series exclusive features.
Developers were forced to update or abandon Mac which gave users a great experience (with some early growing pains).
This is something that Windows will never be able too do. They will always be stuck maintaining an emulator and a likely large subset of apps only supporting one over the other. (also does this work the other way around with an Arm only app working on x86?)
This seems like a repeat of when it was not uncommon for games to only support Intel or AMD or NVIDIA or AMD. But worse since they are not both x86. Sure at least we have emulation but just like with Rosetta2 it shouldn't ever be the long term solution.
I don't think there's any incentive for Nvidia to make this a Windows-only device, so most likely it will be fully supported on Linux, just like their GPUs are.
I think this is the first time an ARM windows device gets marketed for gaming. Would be interesting to see what kind of performance hit games have on the x86 to ARM translation layer.
Rosetta on Mac was obviously impressive. There was also impressive Arm->Intel translation in the mobile ecosystem at one time.
One reason it works surprisingly well on modern systems is how much is offloaded to the GPU. You aren't going to get great power optimization or anything without it being truly native though.
There are games which are CPU limited though, and it will be interesting how those do. Curiously those also tend to be in engines with Arm support already.
For Apple use of Rosetta 2 was only temporary as they moved whole lineup to ARM. MS would not abandon x64 anytime soon. So I'm guessing they will try hard to convince developers to release for both architectures.
I am wary of those ARM-based Windows machines because I am unsure how good the ongoing driver support for those SoCs will be. Will they even outlive the Windows version they currently ship with?
Looking at devices like the NVIDIA Shield gives me some hope that NVIDIA will be better than Qualcomm here. I just hope this is not a case where the OEM has to purchase X years of driver support from the chip vendor beforehand, and that NVIDIA will provide support directly itself.
We'll need to wait for the benchmarks, but this looks great! Windows 11 ARM64 is already amazing, and if these really are an upgrade from the Qualcomm chips we're going to have even better laptops on the market.
For anyone curious to know how this will fare against Macbooks, at least in CPU perf: DGX Spark has the exact same GPU and CPU as the top RTX Spark laptops will, so you can just directly compare from that.
Of course, DGX Spark is a miniPC, so laptops will likely be slower due to power limits/throttling.
What is this product anyway? Is it a general purpose CPU or is it specifically designed for MS Windows? Nvidia stepping back from the open source?
"Introducing the NVIDIA RTX Spark™ Superchip. The fusion of NVIDIA AI and RTX graphics in a single chip redefines Windows PCs and delivers amazing creating, AI development, and gaming—on the slimmest, most beautiful RTX laptops ever and small, ultra-efficient desktops."
Its nvidia attempt to gain additional market share and expected as well. If the whole ecosystem is around nvidia and its the easiest way of running stuff, Nvidia offering more enterprise infrastrcuture allows companies to just buy directly nvidia.
Nvidia is also very very rich and pushes the boundaries of stuff. They stoped waiting for industry standards. You can see this in there network stuff. All nvidia.
Next logical step (at least now, not something i thought about) was there CPU for their GPU racks/clusters/systems.
Now they have everything anyway, RTX Spark is just logical.
I don't think its specificly targeted at Apple at all.
Apple has like 10-15% market share and just because some IT nerds buy themselves a mac mini doesn't mean much.
Plenty of them actually just run openclaw without local models. Something which surprised me quite a lot.
But i have two 4090 at home. They consume a lot of power and i had to research the proper Mainboardmodel and had to mod one 4090 to use water cooling because they run too hot.
There Spark setup was at 3k, way to expensive for normal people. If they can get this down and sell more, great for their ecosystem (strengthening it) and getting more money from people.
It does surprise me though that they have enough capacity for this chip and not just putting everyting in Rubin but perhaps the build out has slowed down a little or they start to diverse already for economic savety
All the news articles in my feed mentioned Nvidia reinventing personal computing which is laughable given the specs are worse than the m series. I’m guessing they saw how well Apple devices were selling and rushed to get something similar out so they can ride the hype train and have something to fall back on if ai DC spend slows down.
There's a lot of companies trying to support datacenter systems like GH and Rubin that don't have dev hardware remotely resembling it. M-series isn't a good option, speaking from the personal experience of currently using one for this exact purpose.
I wouldn't say it's Nvidia stepping back from open source... if anything this is doubling down on it, as one of the selling points of this is the 128GB of unified memory which will allow for hosting local models (i.e, nvidia's new open model they just released). I guess it's pretty cool, I'm a big supporter of local LLMs/open weight models so seems enticing to me, although I'm not sure this will be super applicable to a lot of regular consumers. Seems like a pretty niche product.
+ battery too. I've wondered if a mini pc with battery would make for a good form factor. I often move between places where I have a desk with a screen but still use a laptop because I want to just suspend and resume. If a mini pc had a small battery just to hold its RAM while suspended I could move between places and just plug in a single USB-C cable and have my full workstation up and running. The thermals could be better than in a laptop and having a built-in UPS better than with a desktop. But last time I checked no one packaged things like that.
There's the Khadas Mind series of mini pcs. They have a proprietary docking interface though. Agree that it would be great if this form-factor was more common.
They didn't say that Mediatek made the cpu sores. Grace is NVidia's own cpu arm cores. I bet that Mediatek made other parts of SoC necessary for a notebook
NVIDIA hasn't done custom CPU cores for anything they've yet branded "Grace". The original Grace data center CPU (paired with the Hopper data center GPU) used ARM Neoverse V2 cores. The "GB10" chip shipped in DGX Spark and announced here for RTX Spark uses Cortex X925 and Cortex A725 CPU cores.
Physically, NVIDIA did the GPU chiplet and Mediatek did the other chiplet that has the CPU, DRAM controller, and IO.
GB300 is nominally "available" in desktop form factor workstations priced around $100k. That's a few orders of magnitude away from the ordinary desktop PC market that consumers participate in.
One of the thing that cripples these small AI PCs (including the DGX Spark) is memory bandwidth. The DGX Spark had 275GB/s. For comparison, a 5090 is ~1800GB/s. The M3 Ultra in the current high end Mac Studio is 819GB/s and there will likely be new M5 Mac Studios in Q3. Memory bandwidth is going to directly limit your tokens/sec.
I didn't see this in the announcement linked but according to other reporting [1] the RTX Spark has memory bandwidth of 600GB/s.
I got curious about some other cards. The 5070Ti is 896GB/s. The 5080 is 960GB/s. The RTX 6000 Pro is the same as the 5090, 1792GB/s. The 5090 has an MSRP of $2k but more realistically is $3-3.5k that you can buy it at. The RTX 6000 Pro is ~$10k (ignoring a cheaper, lower-power version). The 6000 Pro has slightly more CUDA cores but is otherwise mostly just a 5090 with more memory. It shows how much NVidia uses VRAM for market segmentation.
It's also why the Apple chips are so interesting. A theoretical M5 Ultra in 2026 Mac Studios will possibly exceed 1000GB/s, putting it in rarefield air. Memory bandwidth isn't everything, obviously, but for this market we're largely talking about inference and memory bandwidth is going to limit performance.
As another data point, the M3 Ultra has no FP4 mode and for FP16 it's 57 TFLOPS (vs 419 for the 5090) so there's still a gap here but I think Apple has a real market opportunity here if they decide to focus on it.
But probably worth clarifying it's not a typical "MediaTek CPU" some might assume by that. It has Nvidia's customized ARM CPU implementation + their GPU.
ARM64+GPU sure seems like the future. I'm still using my M1 and even that can handle models well, has decent graphics, M5 is a beast, and M6 must surely go even bigger on LLM compute. Now Microsoft has a compelling ARM64+GPU future too.
Unified RAM means its soldered to the mainboard, right?
I'm not sure if I like this. Sure for a laptop this might be not a big problem but if this ARM ecosystem is a success it will spread to desktop computers and I fear we could lose the existing modularity.
After nvidia's many years of neglecting Linux, paired with direct Microsoft's involvement? Are we going to trust them, to allow installing Linux in these easily?
I have no idea how powerful or power efficient these guys are, but this seems to be the first step in a bigger push towards Windows on ARM (without loosing gaming).
I think more announcements will follow soon from other companies.
It's worth noting that Nvidia power management on Linux has been absymal. There also aren't any of the usual power management options to see how much power things are using, which is quite atypical for a modern system.
Nvidia really threw stuff over the wall with the DGX Spark release. They don't seem to really care. I sort of think they'll spend a little more time on Windows, where there's no pesky upstreaming to do and they can just do whatever, but man, it's such typical hubris from Nvidia to build such an expensive box with good chips but make it basically unsupportable and roasty hot all the time.
You also generally have to run an ever more stale two year old Ubuntu derived DGX OS to get anywhere, with bespoke kernel and drivers all. None of it is well supported, none of it just works like a comparable PC or even well behaved arm system would.
As for other ARM, there were rumors AMD Sound Wave is/was going to be a ~10W arm APU, but there hasn't been much said about it lately. Honestly given the ram crunch, it's maybe just not worth trying to build a system with a cheap core, if the rest of your costs are going to stay so stratospheric.
https://www.techpowerup.com/341848/amd-sound-wave-arm-powere...
Looks like the MSI one might be a 2-in-1, if it has good stylus support I might have a good candidate for an upgrade, thought my ~3-4 year old Galaxy Book is holding up alright for now.
I really like this, but I think the reason Apple Silicon took off was that Apple sort of forced devs to support ARM. Not sure if Microsoft can do the same for Windows…
Developers weren’t really “forced” to support ARM. They simply recognized that all future Macs would be ARM, whereas most new PCs would continue to run on x86. So the incentive to adopt ARM was much weaker on the PC side.
Strix halo's 8060S gpu is very weak, and is roughly equivalent to a 4060 laptop GPU, whereas GB10's gpu is equivalent to a desktop 5070. For LLM throughput, tok/s is similar due to bottleneck by memory bandwidth, but the GB10 has 3x faster prefill. People have also been able to squeeze out much better performance on GB10 using NVFP4 and other improvements in the months after the DGX Spark launch, so don't be misled by early lackluster benchmarks. For the RTX Spark, which also targets gaming and creative applications, the 3x faster GPU is quite nice.
I feel like the shape of the market right now for "home lab" inference is:
The sparks are good if your ultimate plan is to spend even more on NVidia hardware in future to run your dev setups at usable speeds. Or, you're developing for a work cluster.
If you mainly want to run local models at acceptable speeds portably, buy a mac with lots of RAM. If you’re happy with non-portable / racked, buy 3090s (dense) or mac studios (MoEs). Buy newer cards if you are restricted on power or slots. If you are rich, buy a6000 blackwells.
The only Question is is it worth suffering hip and x86? I suspect a lot of folks might like a machine that mimics their GB300 But costs less than a dgx.
Also I heard the tensor core instructions on the dgx are gimped and you’re better off with a rtx pro x000. Is that the same with these machines?
Is CUDA really a lead for long? Aren’t all the latest competitive approaches avoiding all the standard software stacks and writing deeply customized software that is very directly tied to whatever hardware they use?
And is it really a way to lock in people? With AI coding tools, isn’t it trivial to write software on top of CUDA and rewrite it to target some other hardware?
It all sounds good on paper. But I have trouble believing Windows can be a good platform for this. Microsoft has lost all trust after inserting ads into windows, slowly removing power user features, and exploiting every dark pattern they can. And for years, the ARM based Windows laptops have been useless due to app compatibility issues. Why would this change now? Is it priced to be a lot cheaper than Apple’s laptops? Or is this a niche product for AI developers basically?
The "gaming" take is a strange one indeed for an ARM platform. Hopefully they (Microsoft or Nvidia?) put some real effort into the translation layer. They claim modern AAA games, but it is possible they strongarmed the developers to make them an ARM build for a few select titles...
It's clear gaming was not a major concern, it's just "good enough" for someone running AI models and occasionally wants to play some games, not made to primarily play games.
Yep. I noticed the press releases talk about all the partners they have. It seems like a desperate attempt to manufacture a consensus to invest in this new hardware instead of leaving it sort of abandoned like the other Windows ARM stuff. But the problem is that these attempts end up having a few very visible apps working on the architecture and others not actually doing anything substantial.
Sure the graphics capabilities are probably very good. But if you’re a game developer who has traditionally built on Windows on x86 chips, would you want to invest in this new chip or invest in making games for the Apple ecosystem? Aren’t there more new customers to reach in the Apple world than this new Nvidia world?
> But if you’re a game developer who has traditionally built on Windows on x86 chips, would you want to invest in this new chip or invest in making games for the Apple ecosystem?
Windows and the new chip. Higher developer productivity and higher chances of a substantial audience.
Who cares about Windows, the goal is to run local AI models similar to AMD Strix Halo and Apple Silicon machines. The OS is honestly a distant last concern as long as the models work well, as you could put Linux on these too, but not sure how well wake lock works.
Anecdotally Windows ARM works fine for me, although to be honest most of my work is command line + browser anyway. WSL works like a treat. Steam installs and most lower end games also play fine on my ARM laptop too. Games that require kernel anticheat don't work.
I think they make a great "second device" where you have something meatier to fall back to if something doesn't quite work right. I'm not sure if it's ready to take on the "main device" role just yet. But it's a far far better experience than the Surface RT days.
I would never trust Microsoft. Their next drama is revoking Office 2019 perpetual licenses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRnno9VIZx0. It never ends with them because they know they have you by the balls.
This may finally be the chip family ARM on Windows has always needed. Qualcomm's chips have always been dogs with slow off-the-shelf ARM CPU cores that have pathetic single-threaded performance compared to x86 AMD/Intel or ARM Apple Silicon designs.
Qualcomm Snapdragon x1 and upcoming x2 use their Oryon core and have much faster single-thread performance than Intel/Amd and this nvidia soc that uses off-the-shelf arm cores
That wasn't true of the X1, but apparently the X2 (which is only in a single device so far) does appear to finally be fast. The first Windows ARM CPU to be faster than any of its x86 rivals. Competitive with Apple Silicon single-thread performance even.
I was disappointed to see that the RTX Spark has the ARM cores from the DGX Spark. I was hoping it had their new in-house developed cores that Nvidia is starting to use on their latest gen server parts. They look really fast. That said, if RTX Spark has CPU performance like the DGX Spark, it will be almost as fast as the top AMD/Intel parts.
It won't, the top tier RTX Spark has the same exact CPU and GPU as DGX Spark, so you can check DGX Spark CPU benchmarks to see how it fares. Spoiler: it's about M3 Max level. And they're only coming this fall.
But I really do question how well Windows on Arm is really going to work out long term.
For Apple it worked because they were able to force the issue. If you wanted a new Mac it was going to be Arm and we all knew eventually (this year or is it next year?) Intel support would drop. Over time we have seen M series exclusive features.
Developers were forced to update or abandon Mac which gave users a great experience (with some early growing pains).
This is something that Windows will never be able too do. They will always be stuck maintaining an emulator and a likely large subset of apps only supporting one over the other. (also does this work the other way around with an Arm only app working on x86?)
This seems like a repeat of when it was not uncommon for games to only support Intel or AMD or NVIDIA or AMD. But worse since they are not both x86. Sure at least we have emulation but just like with Rosetta2 it shouldn't ever be the long term solution.
One reason it works surprisingly well on modern systems is how much is offloaded to the GPU. You aren't going to get great power optimization or anything without it being truly native though.
There are games which are CPU limited though, and it will be interesting how those do. Curiously those also tend to be in engines with Arm support already.
What would be interesting to me would be how quickly developers start targeting ARM64 directly.
Looking at devices like the NVIDIA Shield gives me some hope that NVIDIA will be better than Qualcomm here. I just hope this is not a case where the OEM has to purchase X years of driver support from the chip vendor beforehand, and that NVIDIA will provide support directly itself.
Of course, DGX Spark is a miniPC, so laptops will likely be slower due to power limits/throttling.
"Introducing the NVIDIA RTX Spark™ Superchip. The fusion of NVIDIA AI and RTX graphics in a single chip redefines Windows PCs and delivers amazing creating, AI development, and gaming—on the slimmest, most beautiful RTX laptops ever and small, ultra-efficient desktops."
Nvidia is also very very rich and pushes the boundaries of stuff. They stoped waiting for industry standards. You can see this in there network stuff. All nvidia.
Next logical step (at least now, not something i thought about) was there CPU for their GPU racks/clusters/systems.
Now they have everything anyway, RTX Spark is just logical.
I don't think its specificly targeted at Apple at all.
Apple has like 10-15% market share and just because some IT nerds buy themselves a mac mini doesn't mean much.
Plenty of them actually just run openclaw without local models. Something which surprised me quite a lot.
But i have two 4090 at home. They consume a lot of power and i had to research the proper Mainboardmodel and had to mod one 4090 to use water cooling because they run too hot.
There Spark setup was at 3k, way to expensive for normal people. If they can get this down and sell more, great for their ecosystem (strengthening it) and getting more money from people.
It does surprise me though that they have enough capacity for this chip and not just putting everyting in Rubin but perhaps the build out has slowed down a little or they start to diverse already for economic savety
Around 2-3K USD something with a good GPU + CPU + 128GB of integrated RAM is just going to be an awesome experience.
Considering Mac options are north of 5K+ even on a regular day.
+ Windows
+ Screen
- ConnectX-7 Smart NIC
Can the link type be toggled between Ethernet and Infiniband? (Don't think I've ever heard of a laptop with IB.)
Physically, NVIDIA did the GPU chiplet and Mediatek did the other chiplet that has the CPU, DRAM controller, and IO.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1957120-REG/apple_mbp...
$3649 with 128GB of ram
Bosgame M5 AI Mini Desktop Ryzen AI Max+ 395 96GB variant €1.800,95 (sold out)
128GB+2TB variant €2.401,95 (in stock)
I have the latter, it's fantastic
I didn't see this in the announcement linked but according to other reporting [1] the RTX Spark has memory bandwidth of 600GB/s.
I got curious about some other cards. The 5070Ti is 896GB/s. The 5080 is 960GB/s. The RTX 6000 Pro is the same as the 5090, 1792GB/s. The 5090 has an MSRP of $2k but more realistically is $3-3.5k that you can buy it at. The RTX 6000 Pro is ~$10k (ignoring a cheaper, lower-power version). The 6000 Pro has slightly more CUDA cores but is otherwise mostly just a 5090 with more memory. It shows how much NVidia uses VRAM for market segmentation.
It's also why the Apple chips are so interesting. A theoretical M5 Ultra in 2026 Mac Studios will possibly exceed 1000GB/s, putting it in rarefield air. Memory bandwidth isn't everything, obviously, but for this market we're largely talking about inference and memory bandwidth is going to limit performance.
As another data point, the M3 Ultra has no FP4 mode and for FP16 it's 57 TFLOPS (vs 419 for the 5090) so there's still a gap here but I think Apple has a real market opportunity here if they decide to focus on it.
[1]: https://wccftech.com/nvidia-enters-pc-space-with-rtx-spark/
What does AMD or Intel have here?
All I care about is if I can get one of these for significantly less than a dgx and get Linux on it for some cuda Blackwell kerneling.
I'm not sure if I like this. Sure for a laptop this might be not a big problem but if this ARM ecosystem is a success it will spread to desktop computers and I fear we could lose the existing modularity.
But yes, it tends to be soldered on.
I don't think so.
This most likely be a winmodem situation, again
I think more announcements will follow soon from other companies.
Nvidia really threw stuff over the wall with the DGX Spark release. They don't seem to really care. I sort of think they'll spend a little more time on Windows, where there's no pesky upstreaming to do and they can just do whatever, but man, it's such typical hubris from Nvidia to build such an expensive box with good chips but make it basically unsupportable and roasty hot all the time.
You also generally have to run an ever more stale two year old Ubuntu derived DGX OS to get anywhere, with bespoke kernel and drivers all. None of it is well supported, none of it just works like a comparable PC or even well behaved arm system would.
As for other ARM, there were rumors AMD Sound Wave is/was going to be a ~10W arm APU, but there hasn't been much said about it lately. Honestly given the ram crunch, it's maybe just not worth trying to build a system with a cheap core, if the rest of your costs are going to stay so stratospheric. https://www.techpowerup.com/341848/amd-sound-wave-arm-powere...
A powerful new chapter for Windows PCs, accelerated by Nvidia RTX Spark
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352693
Surface Laptop Ultra: Made for World Makers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352627
bechmarks with DGX arnt spectacular for NVIDIAs software and CUDA lead.
wouldnt count on this being a price/compute challenger. especially with overpriced VRAM.
All those CUDA cores in the sparks but they're starved for memory bandwidth.
I am still waiting for NVidia to release a system that legit beats 3090 maxxing for the home gamer...
The sparks are good if your ultimate plan is to spend even more on NVidia hardware in future to run your dev setups at usable speeds. Or, you're developing for a work cluster.
If you mainly want to run local models at acceptable speeds portably, buy a mac with lots of RAM. If you’re happy with non-portable / racked, buy 3090s (dense) or mac studios (MoEs). Buy newer cards if you are restricted on power or slots. If you are rich, buy a6000 blackwells.
Also I heard the tensor core instructions on the dgx are gimped and you’re better off with a rtx pro x000. Is that the same with these machines?
And is it really a way to lock in people? With AI coding tools, isn’t it trivial to write software on top of CUDA and rewrite it to target some other hardware?
no.
NVIDIA and Microsoft Reinvent Windows PCs for the Age of Personal AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352705
NVIDIA DGX Station for Windows Puts a Trillion-Parameter AI Supercomputer on Every Enterprise Desk
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352691
Introducing Surface Laptop Ultra: Made for world makers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352627
Introducing a powerful new chapter for Windows PCs, accelerated by NVIDIA RTX Spark
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352693
Sure the graphics capabilities are probably very good. But if you’re a game developer who has traditionally built on Windows on x86 chips, would you want to invest in this new chip or invest in making games for the Apple ecosystem? Aren’t there more new customers to reach in the Apple world than this new Nvidia world?
Windows and the new chip. Higher developer productivity and higher chances of a substantial audience.
I think they make a great "second device" where you have something meatier to fall back to if something doesn't quite work right. I'm not sure if it's ready to take on the "main device" role just yet. But it's a far far better experience than the Surface RT days.
I was disappointed to see that the RTX Spark has the ARM cores from the DGX Spark. I was hoping it had their new in-house developed cores that Nvidia is starting to use on their latest gen server parts. They look really fast. That said, if RTX Spark has CPU performance like the DGX Spark, it will be almost as fast as the top AMD/Intel parts.