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Get a DGX spark. Ships with aarch64 Ubuntu 24.04. Tons of cores and RAM. Very quiet and small UEFI bootloader - I installed Ubuntu 25.10 and ESXi arm editio

by moondev 10mo ago

Get a DGX spark. Ships with aarch64 Ubuntu 24.04. Tons of cores and RAM. Very quiet and small UEFI bootloader - I installed Ubuntu 25.10 and ESXi arm edition just by booting the ISO usb-c power input (kinda cool) Insane connectx 200GbE RoCE networking 10GbE Ethernet Oh and an nvidia gpu with cuda and access to 128GB of unified memory It would be perfect if it had some kind of BMC or IPMI/redfish and an exposed PCIE slot. But this thing is an awesome arm64 workstation no doubt. May try to install to a USB drive and hang another gpu off the nvme port just to see what happens

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
didip 10mo ago
Is it easy to buy a DGX Spark?
- moondev 10mo ago
  My microcenter has nvidia OEM flavor in stock. There are also flavors from all the other OEMs that differ slightly on cooling but mainly on chassis design.
Keyframe 10mo ago
This might sound silly question, but those of you who have digits/spark machine, has anyone run Fedora on it? I kind of ran away from Ubuntu back to Fedora because reasons. Bonus question, far-fetched, steam and games with FEX?
- my123 10mo ago
  Fedora boots ootb
- wtallis 10mo ago
  Steam gaming with FEX is possible on the DGX Spark. The GPU is approximately a mobile 5070 with much less memory bandwidth. The CPU cores are relatively weak, especially after the instruction set translation overhead. There's a lot of stuff that's playable, but the performance is laughably bad for a $4000 machine.
  - Keyframe 10mo ago
    FEX wouldn't affect GPU side of things though. Also, it's a machine that fits into one and a half hand. I'd call it alright for what it is actually in the context of the size.
    - wtallis 10mo ago
      FEX is relevant to real use cases because a lot of things that would be GPU-limited on an x86 machine can become CPU-limited when running on DGX Spark. The overhead of x86 to ARM translation, plus the low performance of the ARM cores, plus the overhead of WINE all add up to Windows games running on DGX Spark sometimes being CPU-limited and under-utilizing the GPU.
SSLy 10mo ago
It seems incredible but uhm, way out of my mitteleuropaishe budget
arjie 10mo ago
Oh that's a good shout. A friend did get one of these so I'll go take a look at it and see what it's like.
tecleandor 10mo ago
And, any other options or recommendations if I don't need the huge GPU? Seems like the middle ground between SBCs and huge servers is a bit underserved in ARM...

by moondev 10mo ago

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

didip 10mo ago

Is it easy to buy a DGX Spark?

moondev 10mo ago
My microcenter has nvidia OEM flavor in stock. There are also flavors from all the other OEMs that differ slightly on cooling but mainly on chassis design.

Keyframe 10mo ago

This might sound silly question, but those of you who have digits/spark machine, has anyone run Fedora on it? I kind of ran away from Ubuntu back to Fedora because reasons. Bonus question, far-fetched, steam and games with FEX?

my123 10mo ago
Fedora boots ootb
wtallis 10mo ago
Steam gaming with FEX is possible on the DGX Spark. The GPU is approximately a mobile 5070 with much less memory bandwidth. The CPU cores are relatively weak, especially after the instruction set translation overhead. There's a lot of stuff that's playable, but the performance is laughably bad for a $4000 machine.
- Keyframe 10mo ago
  FEX wouldn't affect GPU side of things though. Also, it's a machine that fits into one and a half hand. I'd call it alright for what it is actually in the context of the size.
  - wtallis 10mo ago
    FEX is relevant to real use cases because a lot of things that would be GPU-limited on an x86 machine can become CPU-limited when running on DGX Spark. The overhead of x86 to ARM translation, plus the low performance of the ARM cores, plus the overhead of WINE all add up to Windows games running on DGX Spark sometimes being CPU-limited and under-utilizing the GPU.

SSLy 10mo ago

It seems incredible but uhm, way out of my mitteleuropaishe budget

arjie 10mo ago

Oh that's a good shout. A friend did get one of these so I'll go take a look at it and see what it's like.

tecleandor 10mo ago

And, any other options or recommendations if I don't need the huge GPU? Seems like the middle ground between SBCs and huge servers is a bit underserved in ARM...