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Ask HN: How to Choose a Laptop for ML and Deep Learning?
Hi HN,
I'm currently looking forward to join a master's program after my current career (in the lines of software engineering). I want to be ready to work with machine learning and deep learning libraries and be able to develop state of the art programs.
My problem is that I don't know what requirements should I be looking for in a laptop. What do you use? Do you have any laptop recommendation?
Everything is useful :)
Thanks!
- T-A 10y agoIf it has to be a laptop, one along these lines: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/10series/laptops https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/10series/lapto... You'll want a good GPU to train deep neural nets, and most libraries require one with CUDA support, i.e. an NVIDIA card. The GTX 10 series essentially dropped the distinction between desktop and mobile cards, so you won't be giving up as much peak performance as in the past by getting a laptop. I still prefer to do such things on a desktop system with plenty of power and cooling headroom, where running at full tilts for hours or days on end is not a problem. Doing the same on a laptop feels like asking for trouble.
- aaossa 10y agoThanks for your reply! Do you know if CUDNN support makes a difference in this case?
- T-A 10y agoThe list of CUDNN-supported frameworks, https://developer.nvidia.com/deep-learning-frameworks https://developer.nvidia.com/deep-learning-frameworks is pretty much a Who's Who of all the most popular ones. In that sense, CUDNN support does not make much of a difference - any framework you're likely to choose has it, and any recent NVIDIA card will run it.
- shanecleveland 10y agoThe top recommendation on reddit includes a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10 card: http://laptopkarma.com http://laptopkarma.com
- stevenaleach 10y agoA machine learning laptop doesn't make a lot of sense - you won't find a laptop with a comparable GPU. Really, the answer is whatever you are comfortable working on - you'll be connecting to a server or AWS GPU instance to actually train any large net and generally writing and testing on a laptop. That being said, get anything with an NVIDIA card (for the time being everything runs on CUDA) or that testing will be done on the CPU, though perhaps there will be libraries supporting OpenCL down the road.
- T-A 10y ago> you won't find a laptop with a comparable GPU Sure you will: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/nvidia-pascal-laptop-specs-gtx-1080/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/nvidia-pascal-laptop... The real problem is sustained performance within a laptop form factor, as the article says: How well the GTX 1080 maintains that speed within the confines of a laptop is largely going to depend on the design chops of laptop makers It gets hot in those tight little boxes.
- aaossa 10y agoYes, you're right. I was thinking in using an NVIDIA card that allows me to use CUDA and CUDNN. Do you know if CUDNN makes a difference? Thanks!