Nvidia sells tiny new pc that places massive AI in your desktop

For the OS, the Spark is an ARM-based system that runs Nvidia’s DGX OS, an Ubuntu Linux-based working system constructed particularly for GPU processing. It comes with Nvidia’s AI software program stack preinstalled, together with CUDA libraries and the corporate’s NIM microservices.

Costs for the DGX Spark begin at US $3,999. Which will look like quite a bit, however given the price of high-end GPUs with ample video RAM just like the RTX Professional 6000 (about $9,000) or AI server GPUs (like $25,000 for a base-level H100), the DGX Spark might signify a far cheaper possibility total, although it is not practically as highly effective.

Actually, based on The Register, the GPU computing efficiency of the GB10 chip is roughly equal to an RTX 5070. Nonetheless, the 5070 is restricted to 12GB of video reminiscence, which limits the dimensions of AI fashions that may be run on such a system. With 128GB of unified reminiscence, the DGX Spark can run far bigger fashions, albeit at a slower velocity than, say, an RTX 5090 (which usually ships with 24 GB of RAM). For instance, to run the 120 billion-parameter bigger model of OpenAI’s current gpt-oss language mannequin, you’d want about 80GB of reminiscence, which is excess of you will get in a shopper GPU.

A callback to 2016

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang marked the event of the DGX Spark launch by personally delivering one of many first items to Elon Musk at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Texas, echoing a comparable supply Huang made to Musk at OpenAI in 2016.

“In 2016, we constructed DGX-1 to present AI researchers their very own supercomputer. I hand-delivered the primary system to Elon at a small startup referred to as OpenAI, and from it got here ChatGPT,” Huang mentioned in a press release. “DGX-1 launched the period of AI supercomputers and unlocked the scaling legal guidelines that drive trendy AI. With DGX Spark, we return to that mission.”