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AMD 395+ is more bang for the buck IMO. GMKtec EVO-X2 vs GX10 vs MacBook Pro M4 Max Price: $2,199.99 / $3,000 / $5,000 CPU: Ryzen AI Max 395+ (Strix Hal

by hasperdi 11mo ago

AMD 395+ is more bang for the buck IMO. GMKtec EVO-X2 vs GX10 vs MacBook Pro M4 Max Price: $2,199.99 / $3,000 / $5,000 CPU: Ryzen AI Max 395+ (Strix Halo, 16C/32T) / NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB200 Superchip (20-core ARM v9.2) / Apple M4 Max (12C) GPU: Radeon 890M (RDNA3 iGPU) / Integrated Blackwell GPU (up to 1 PFLOP FP4) / 40-core integrated GPU Memory: 128GB LPDDR5X / 128GB LPDDR5X unified / 128GB unified Memory bandwidth: ???GB/s / ~500GB/s / ~546GB/s SSD: 1TB PCIe 4.0 / 4TB PCIe 5.0 / 1TB NVMe GPU advantage: Similar (EVO-X2 trades blows with GB10 depending on model and framework) Network: 2.5GbE / 10GbE / 10GbE (via TB) Direct cluster: 40Gb (USB4/TB4) / 200Gb / 80Gb Portable: Semi (compact desktop) / No / Yes Free Mac included: No / No / Yes Free monitor: No / No / Yes Linux out of the box: Yes / Yes / No CUDA dev environment: No (ROCm) / Yes / No

wtallis 11mo ago
The DGX Spark, Ascent GX10, and related machines have no relation to NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB200. The chip they are based on is called GB10, and is architecturally very different from NVIDIA's datacenter solutions, in addition to being vastly smaller and less powerful. They don't have anything resembling the Grace CPU NVIDIA used in Grace Hopper and Grace Blackwell datacenter products. The CPU portion of GB10 is a Mediatek phone chip's CPU complex that metastasized, not NVIDIA's datacenter CPU cut down.
- tgma 11mo ago
  Where does MediaTek come into the picture? Don't they take some ARM Cortex IP directly from ARM just like MediaTek and many others?
  - wtallis 11mo ago
    Mediatek is in the picture because NVIDIA outsourced everything in GB10 but the GPU to Mediatek. GB10 is two chiplets, and the larger one is from Mediatek. Yes, Mediatek uses off the shelf ARM CPU core IP, but they still had to make a lot of decisions about how to implement it: how many cores, what cluster and cache arrangements, none of which resemble NVIDIA's Grace CPU.
    - tgma 11mo ago
      Thanks for the clarification. I was surprised to learn it is not a single chip; thought they did something akin to Apple Silicon integrating some ARM cores on their main chip. Kind of disappointing: they basically asked MediaTek to build a CPU with an NV-Link I/O.
      - wtallis 11mo ago
        The big picture is probably that GB10 is destined to show up in laptops, but NVIDIA couldn't be bothered to do all the boring work of building the rest of the SoC and Mediatek was the cheapest and easiest partner available. It'll eventually be followed by an Intel SoC with NVIDIA providing the GPU chiplet, but in the meantime the Mediatek CPU solution is good enough. From NVIDIA's perspective, they need an answer to the growing segment of SoCs with decent sized GPUs and unified memory; their existing solutions at the far end of a PCIe link with a small pool of their own memory just can't work for some important use cases, and providing GPU chiplets to be integrated into other SoCs is how they avoid losing ground in these markets without the expense of building their own full consumer hardware platform and going to war with all of Apple, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm.

wtallis 11mo ago

The DGX Spark, Ascent GX10, and related machines have no relation to NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB200. The chip they are based on is called GB10, and is architecturally very different from NVIDIA's datacenter solutions, in addition to being vastly smaller and less powerful. They don't have anything resembling the Grace CPU NVIDIA used in Grace Hopper and Grace Blackwell datacenter products. The CPU portion of GB10 is a Mediatek phone chip's CPU complex that metastasized, not NVIDIA's datacenter CPU cut down.

tgma 11mo ago
Where does MediaTek come into the picture? Don't they take some ARM Cortex IP directly from ARM just like MediaTek and many others?
- wtallis 11mo ago
  Mediatek is in the picture because NVIDIA outsourced everything in GB10 but the GPU to Mediatek. GB10 is two chiplets, and the larger one is from Mediatek. Yes, Mediatek uses off the shelf ARM CPU core IP, but they still had to make a lot of decisions about how to implement it: how many cores, what cluster and cache arrangements, none of which resemble NVIDIA's Grace CPU.
  - tgma 11mo ago
    Thanks for the clarification. I was surprised to learn it is not a single chip; thought they did something akin to Apple Silicon integrating some ARM cores on their main chip. Kind of disappointing: they basically asked MediaTek to build a CPU with an NV-Link I/O.
    - wtallis 11mo ago
      The big picture is probably that GB10 is destined to show up in laptops, but NVIDIA couldn't be bothered to do all the boring work of building the rest of the SoC and Mediatek was the cheapest and easiest partner available. It'll eventually be followed by an Intel SoC with NVIDIA providing the GPU chiplet, but in the meantime the Mediatek CPU solution is good enough. From NVIDIA's perspective, they need an answer to the growing segment of SoCs with decent sized GPUs and unified memory; their existing solutions at the far end of a PCIe link with a small pool of their own memory just can't work for some important use cases, and providing GPU chiplets to be integrated into other SoCs is how they avoid losing ground in these markets without the expense of building their own full consumer hardware platform and going to war with all of Apple, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm.