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chem83 13 hours ago [-]
Not sure there's a strong use case for one of these $6K laptops yet, considering you can get a mini PC running AMD Ryzen 495 or 395 with 96, 128 and 192 GB of memory for similar amount of money and connect remotely from a cheaper/smaller/more battery-efficient laptop. Microsoft also has this same chip in non-laptop form factor: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-rtx-....
Coding while flying is often the use case people bring up, but the power brick these laptops come with sometimes trip the plane's power plug in coach and you can't run local AI on battery for long. Also, over time planes will get better connectivity (Starlink etc.) and that particular full-offline scenario will go away.
For gaming, there are better options with dedicated GPUs like the Asus Zephyrus and similar.
What am I missing?
radium3d 13 hours ago [-]
The strong case is pretty much only if you can't wait another 3-4 years for ram prices to come back down.
Memory makers are responding with a huge build-out. Building a fab shell and cleanroom takes years, which is why the crunch has lasted so long, but many of these projects are now well underway. New capacity is what ended past memory shortages. New factories going in:
SK hynix
M15X, Cheongju, Korea: first wafers early 2026 (reported), ramping through 2027
Yongin Y1, Korea: first cleanroom Feb 2027 (company target)
Yongin Y2, Korea: groundbreaking planned July 2027, first cleanroom June 2029
Micron
ID1, Boise: first wafer output mid-2027
Tongluo, Taiwan: an existing PSMC cleanroom it bought for $1.8B, with meaningful shipments mid-2027
ID2, Boise: late 2028
Hiroshima, Japan: broke ground July 2026, with initial output late 2028
Clay, New York (up to 4 fabs, $100B): broke ground Jan 2026, with first output in 2030
Samsung
P5, Pyeongtaek: mass production 2028 (reported)
Yongin national complex: site work began Oct 2026, with the first fab targeting Oct 2029 (reported; Samsung hasn't given a date)
Nanya
Fab 5A, New Taipei: 10nm-class EUV DRAM, with wafer starts in 2H 2027 (reported)
Tesla / SpaceX (Terafab)
Research fab at Giga Texas, Austin: broke ground April 2026. There's no official output date.
Grimes County, Texas (logic, memory, packaging; Phase 1 over $16.8B): land clearing since Aug 2026. Texas filings say commercial operations in 2028, but SemiAnalysis estimates late 2029.
The first real supply relief is 2027, a second wave comes in 2028–29, and a lot of that new capacity is aimed at HBM and server memory, so consumer DDR5 and GDDR will likely ease last.
Sources: Micron FQ4 2026 call, the SK hynix newsroom, TrendForce, Texas JETI filings via ENR, and Tom's Hardware/SemiAnalysis.
to11mtm 12 hours ago [-]
> which is why the crunch has lasted so long,
It's been like a year-ish...
And maybe 2027 is a truly optimistic relief on some level,
> a second wave comes in 2028–29, and a lot of that new capacity is aimed at HBM and server memory, so consumer DDR5 and GDDR will likely ease last.
'Consumer DDR5' has a pretty big set of knock-on effects though.
Unless you are working at a 'tech' company, the norm is that even developer machines will be constrained on memory usage for a given workload[0][1]. IOW companies trying to keep procurement in check wind up looking at procurement cost vs lost productivity.
[0] - Modern infosec and corporate software, at least where I'm at, seems to be vaguely more efficient than electron apps, IOW I can reboot, open teams and my IDE, after 4GBish of my IDE and 1GB of a fresh Teams instance I'm already around 16 of 32GB.
[1] - I had to fight hard to get 32GB as a developer baseline at my org. They wanted 16GB. Ironically the JVM based devs get 64GB but still have slowdown issues on biuld...
josephg 12 hours ago [-]
> Unless you are working at a 'tech' company, the norm is that even developer machines will be constrained on memory usage for a given workload
Honestly I think most of us are just spoiled kids crying when our expensive toys are being taken away. If memory cost 10x more to manufacture than it does now, we’d just have 10x less ram in our computers and our software would be written to deal with that. We’ve done it before. My first computer had 4mb of ram and it ran windows 3.1 just fine. We still had working compilers. If ram were 10x cheaper before the supply shock, I think we’d be crying that companies won’t buy us 320gb ram in our laptops. The java and rust compilers would somehow be even less ram efficient. Firefox and chrome would still happily use it all to run adware across the same 50 tabs I want to keep open.
Theres good reason for LLMs to need that much ram. But very little else we do on our computers needs anywhere near as much ram as we use. Have faster computers made video games more fun in the last two decades? I don’t think so.
The supply crisis is annoying. But I’m also a little glad there’s a reason to push back on fat, lazy software.
delta_p_delta_x 4 hours ago [-]
> our software would be written to deal with that
I work at a place which offers a well-known operating system and also sells hardware which runs said OS. This is exactly what we have done, because the hardware releases this year have had to come with a quarter less memory. There is an internal effort to reduce memory consumption by a quarter at all levels of the platform, from the kernel, to the drivers and user-mode libraries, to the toolkits and user-mode applications. This has been remarkably successful.
josephg 12 minutes ago [-]
I’m not surprised! The amount of wasted memory and compute in modern software is astounding.
If you’re a developer, try promoting Claude to profile and optimise a piece of some piece of software. I routinely see 20-40x improvements with a single prompt and a few hours of opus credits.
Thanks for your work by the way. At a large scale, it is much more efficient for some software developers to do a bit of belt tightening in their code than ask millions of customers to invest in bigger computers. Globally the savings are enormous.
shric 11 hours ago [-]
I noticed yesterday that the original Ultima 7 required 2 MB of RAM and a 386 or 386SX [1]
You can buy a version from gog that runs on Windows 10 requiring 2 GB of RAM and an unspecified 1.8GHz CPU [2]
Realistically, GOG probably is trying to accommodate for the OS running the game. So it is more for the spec of the PC, not the RAM the game itself needs
shric 4 hours ago [-]
Don’t spoil my hyperbole with facts
aa-jv 2 hours ago [-]
Well, so its not just bloated software that makes software bloated, but bloated facts, too. Users will see specs like that and go "well, I need to upgrade my machine from 2mb to 8gigs now, d'oh!" ...
altairprime 11 hours ago [-]
I bet these factories exclusively build DDR6 and whatever GDDR is up to next, rather than DDR5, since that was already scheduled for 2027 anyways. Hopefully they don’t immediately shutter their DDR5 facilities rather than cut into their 90% operating margins :)
trinsic2 7 hours ago [-]
Maybe I'm missing something but didn't micron exit the consumer DDR market for HBM? I don't see a rollback from that. When you say DDR will ease last, in what reality would memory makers go back to a market they left behind?
hermitShell 10 hours ago [-]
So do you think there will be a big crash and memory will get really cheap in 2030, or do you believe that AI demand is strong enough to sustain all this buildout?
It seems like this list also doesn't account for China and state sponsored memory industry (which will be more immune to a downturn)
150g2 5 hours ago [-]
"You will be owned and you will be drugged to look like a happy." 20 somethin... Forum.
MrFlynn 13 hours ago [-]
The core design is also approaching 3 years old at this point, so it’s not really even that competitive with the latest stuff out of the other chip makers. It’s fine, but nothing to write home about. Certainly not worth the crazy premium Nvidia is charging for it.
Grombobulous 12 hours ago [-]
I don’t even really think it’s “fine.” It’s hard to even understand who they are for. Just Josh Tech on YouTube did a great review of these laptops as they’re hitting the market.
Good battery life is probably the biggest upside, but the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Zephyrus G16 is just about as good (more on that alternative later).
The downsides are numerous:
- Middling GPU performance compared to discrete RTX mobile GPUs. You’re barely trading blows with an 5070Ti with the top end Spark chip. And yes, Nvidia markets RTX Spark for gaming, so we need to judge them in that context, too. Windows on ARM isn’t amazing for gaming for various reasons including lack of anti-cheat compatibility.
- Compatibility and/or performance issues on Windows ARM. You’re running a lot of stuff non-native
- As you mentioned, the CPU cores are nothing to write home about with very mid single core performance.
- Suffers greatly from “why am I not buying a MacBook Pro?” syndrome
- Poor/no Linux support, in a world where when Linux and Mac get the most attention for AI workflows.
I think there may be a case for being a good performance value for AI training, but for local inference I’m not seeing how that makes sense. Heck, for local inference I think it’s better to run a workstation as a server and then use the laptop as a client. You benefit from a better hardware value as well as putting less of the strain on the laptop, saving battery life. The fact that it’s plugged in means you can run long-running jobs and scheduled tasks, which is often the strength of local AI. The cost of one of these RTX Spark laptops will get you a dual R9700 inference workstation if you’re smart about the build.
You’ve also got projects like Strata that are going to define trends for how people run local AI. Why bother with $6000 integrated graphics machines or trying to squeeze quality models into one or two expensive 24-32GB GPUs when you can get 60 tok/s on Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on a 16GB RX 9060XT ($500) with 64GB of DDR4 RAM?
Want to do local inference on a laptop? Grab a Zephyrus G16, get the 64GB/RTX 5080 spec, run Strata, then as a bonus you can run AAA games at full blast. This costs less than $5000.
Waiting ~1 year for the M7 Pro chip on MacBook Pro models is another option that is almost certainly a better idea if the rumors about that chip are true.
I’m struggling to find a way to find a worse value buying something, anything that isn’t an RTX Spark. For that money there are just so many alternatives.
esperent 7 hours ago [-]
> Suffers greatly from “why am I not buying a MacBook Pro?” syndrome
Well, reading the reviews it's clear these are filling the MacBook Pro gap in windows laptop lineups.
And the answer to "why am I not buying a MacBook Pro?" for many people is because it's a MacBook pro. I've never owned Apple hardware in my life and have no desire to do so now but I do wish there was equivalent quality non Apple hardware (for me that I can run Linux on, but for many people, Windows would be fine). If the price was lower, I'd be in the market for one of these.
So far the only options has been gaming/creator laptops with dedicated GPUs. I currently have an MSI Ge66 and it's a great laptop in many ways but it runs so hot, and the fan is so loud. I'd pay a premium (but not $6000!) to reduce that. Also, the unified memory is a big draw for both Blender and local AI.
6 hours ago [-]
dllu 11 hours ago [-]
Lack of anti cheat is rather outdated perception of Windows on Arm. Most popular competitive games like League of Legends have native arm versions now.
6 hours ago [-]
Grombobulous 6 hours ago [-]
The problem is more holistic. It’s a buyer persona problem.
Even if your game is running natively and your anti-cheat is supported, you’d have gotten better performance on a Zephyrus G14/G16 for less money.
If you want to do local AI a MacBook Pro is either keeping up or going faster (faster memory bandwidth, token output writes faster), with faster single-core CPU performance as a bonus for general purpose snappiness.
In my eyes, the only buyer left is someone who can’t stand a MacBook Pro, or needs Nvidia/CUDA and a lot of VRAM.
To be more generous to the RTX Spark platform, it does seem to be priced head-to-head with Apple. I just think it has an uphill battle.
benoau 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah but this is all there is until what 2028? 2029? And those could cost 2x-3x too.
rwz 12 hours ago [-]
I feel like even if a next generation of chips dropped tomorrow, it'd be a while until they can scale up production and actually start selling products you or I could realistically purchase and by that time this new generation chip would already by a couple of years old with something much better and powerful in the final stages of design.
cmrdporcupine 12 hours ago [-]
If it's anything like my DGX Spark, the "premium" is almost 100% just the memory cost, not the GPU or ARM core.
10 months ago when I got my Spark it was competitive in price with a similarly spec'd out Mac Studio. As RAM prices have gone even more parabolic, so has its price. And so has the Mac's. And the Strix Halo competitors.
Vaslo 12 hours ago [-]
May always be behind with how fast things change, you think?
solyin 2 hours ago [-]
That when civilization falls, and we have to go to techno agrarian farming, like in Interstellar, the person with the RTX isn't the one that's going to be left behind, it's the person with the cloud account that owns nothing.
schaefer 10 hours ago [-]
>> Not sure there's a strong use case…
The author’s discussion of their personal use case starts on the seventh sentence in TFA. And frankly, it sounds like a pretty solid use case:
“Being able to run things locally and mess around with RL, quantisation and fine-tuning on a laptop would be sick. I already publish my own GGUF quants on Hugging Face, with over 160,000 downloads in the past month.”
mrheosuper 9 hours ago [-]
This is similar to "Why buy powerful gaming laptop when you can build a gaming PC and a cheap laptop to remote into it". That was my setup years ago, and there are a lot of nuance things i hadn't taken into account.
For example, network is not always available and stable; File transferring is limited by connection speed, hardware passthrough is basically nonexistence; Dealing with power management (Unexpected power loss) and so on.
I bet they all can be solved(to some bearable degree), but at that point, just bite a bullet and get a powerful laptop.
Gigachad 8 hours ago [-]
The difference is that streaming zero latency 4k video is incredibly difficult and always results in serious compromises. For AI programming, the end output is very small, not latency sensitive very easy to stream over the internet.
I'm sure you can come up with some scenario where you are programming in the wilderness with no internet connection but the market for that has to be in the tens of people.
giancarlostoro 13 hours ago [-]
The Nvidia based one uses the memory for the GPU allowing you to run AI models on the GPU, the system you're talking about has no such setup. These are Nvidia powered laptops that do what Apple does with their laptops where the system and GPU VRAM are shared as needed, except the idea here is that Nvidia designed these to perform very well for local inference, at least, that's how I understand it.
girvo 13 hours ago [-]
No, the AMD ones he’s talking about allow the GPU to address that memory as well: they’re “APU’s” that share system RAM as GPU memory
That said the compute power of the GB10 is awesome, my DGX Spark-like has been better than I expected.
fy20 13 hours ago [-]
Depending on what you are doing you may find all the models are written for CUDA though. I'm playing with gaussian splatting and it's like that. Codex is doing a good job porting stuff to Metal, but it would be easier & faster if I had Nvidia hardware to just run the models natively.
Not everything with AI is LLMs running on llama.cpp.
judge2020 10 hours ago [-]
https://zluda.org/ seems to work at near-native performance from what I can find on Google.
Interesco 9 hours ago [-]
Is that the legit site? Clicking the "testimonials" directed me to a link where Opera (with which malware is commonly bundled) auto-downloaded.
giancarlostoro 13 hours ago [-]
That's the thing, my understanding is that these Nvidia ones are supposed to have very impressive performance.
Melatonic 11 hours ago [-]
They're severely hampered by memory bandwidth
girvo 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, but in practice it’s more interesting than that
The massively lopsided compute makes speculative execution techniques (MTP/DFlash etc) way more effective, which makes modern MoE models quite usable
I’m running Qwen 3.8 Flash Next with Nota AI’s conservative NVFP4 quant at 30tk/s lowest decode, usually more around 45-55 for coding, and with prompt processing at a solid 2000tk/s
And that’s without very optimised kernels or anything, mostly standard vLLM
smcleod 12 hours ago [-]
Both the AMD Ryzen 395/495 and the Spark have terribly slow bandwidth, their performance is slower than a M2 max, akin to just an M4 Pro or RTX 4060.
barrkel 12 hours ago [-]
You're not missing anything. Most devices these days are extremely limited without internet access.
Tailscale is the key ingredient.
5vg 13 hours ago [-]
i don’t think they’re flying coach after spending 6k on a laptop…
Kirby64 13 hours ago [-]
Why? Flying business everywhere is substantially more expensive than a one time cost of $6k for a laptop. A single business ticket anywhere overseas matches or exceeds that in most cases.
13 hours ago [-]
kjs3 11 hours ago [-]
Last first class ticket I bought was US$13k, or a bit less than $500/hr in the air for the trip I took. A 6k laptop that I'm gonna use for 8-12 hrs/day for a couple of years is a rounding error in comparison.
cortesoft 13 hours ago [-]
What? I have spent $10k on a computer but would never fly business or first class, that shit is way too expensive. Two trips would buy a new $10k computer!
fsckboy 7 hours ago [-]
but you're in a position to understand now, that people who do fly business everywhere, can also afford one of these laptops for a fraction of what they spend flying. that's the use case.
lifeisloving 12 hours ago [-]
You could just code on a flight.. No need for llm. Id your brain is incapable of writing code without internet/llms you could write your specs/prompts for when you land.
SimianSci 13 hours ago [-]
The AMD hardware is x86_64, which means lower battery life on average for normal users, and as an architecture, it is very well supported across the Windows ecosystem.
The RTX Spark is ARM64, which means more efficient power management at the cost of a small hit to sustained performance loads. But comes at the cost of being less supported when it comes to available software packages.
Aside from this, I’m led to believe that the AMD stack when it comes to local models has more overhead related to its need to translate more NVIDIA native instructions and therefore can be less performant than Nvidia.
Not sure how true this is anymore, but ive yet to hear otherwise.
Topfi 13 hours ago [-]
> The AMD hardware is x86_64, which means lower battery life on average for normal users [...]
A Ryzen AI Max+ 395 powered tablet with 70Wh [0] gets the same battery life given the same task as a Nvidia N1X powered laptop with 99.9 Wh [1].
Power Consumption in their "Cyberpunk / Stress Test" is also lower at Ø109.3 (108.8-110.8) Watt for the x86_64 vs Ø134.5 (132.1-137.5) Watt for the arm64 system using the same settings, resolution and display brightness. They also get the same performance when normalising for resolutions and settings in Cyberpunk, so this is not an instance of one providing significantly more performance.
To add, battery life on this chip hasn’t been that impressive [1]. It’s basically matching recent MacBook Pros, while sporting a significantly larger battery. Both AMD and Intel have made significant strides in improving power consumption on their latest core designs, to the point where there isn’t a lot of difference anymore.
A mini pc doesnt have a battery. Your point doesnt seem very coherent.
esseph 9 hours ago [-]
> Aside from this, I’m led to believe that the AMD stack when it comes to local models has more overhead related to its need to translate more NVIDIA native instructions and therefore can be less performant than Nvidia. Not sure how true this is anymore, but ive yet to hear otherwise.
Uh, well you'd just download lemonade server and use models designed explicitly for the hardware from hugging face.
Being forced to login to use your own hardware is one issue for sure…
but separately everything about Microsoft’s login experience is pure pain.
Multiple broken redirects, broken links, buttons that loop, and more just to hit a CAPTCHA AI can solve anyway.
The only thing worse is for the poor soul developers who have had to login to their dev portal to setup SSO Microsoft for an app. It’s the worst I have ever seen in my life (even using Supabase that hand holds you through it).
abhinavk 5 hours ago [-]
The recovery image of my laptop is based on an old Win11 build where Microsoft login is now broken. So it falls back to local account after failing. Best bug!
tuvix 12 hours ago [-]
Got stuck in a loop with my work account recently after setting up a passkey. It would cycle through something like 12 different pages, loading then redirecting before eventually ending at “You have been signed out”. Awful
74948494i4 13 hours ago [-]
I got the HP version of this 128GB for 3.8k. I have yet to see a better deal for that ram.
3.8k is less than the preorder cost of the DGX Spark over a year ago (Oct 14th, 2025).
bigwheels 11 hours ago [-]
He got a slick deals deal. Great site.
m463 11 hours ago [-]
Did it actually come in the mail?
I've bought some low-priced things on amazon, just to have them cancelled. Spooky since I figure someone got my name, address, phone number from amazon.
tiernano 2 hours ago [-]
i see a lot of complaining about the login part of Win11, and i dont like it either, but i have not seen anyone mention that you can build an autounattend.xml file (generator here: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/) that allows you to bypass all this. I have a USB Key with the file and the latest copy of the 11 Pro download, and when setting up a new machine, i run a fresh install. Then once booted, i run the developer config (https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsDeveloperConfig/) and it gets everything i need installed. No Microsoft Login, no Candy Crush, WSL installed and all the tools i need.
jasoneckert 13 hours ago [-]
I have a DGX Spark (Ubuntu), and when Microsoft and NVIDIA announced the RTX Spark running Windows, I thought to myself: Why would I get that instead of the DGX Spark?
The OS makes a big difference for most developers, and the DGX Spark stack and experience is mature.
manyatoms 13 hours ago [-]
I thought so too, but there's a ton of people out there wading their way through trying to re-purpose their gaming rigs to run qwen3.8-flash-next on their gaming rig (at Q2..) via WSL
wmf 12 hours ago [-]
RTX Spark is $1,000 cheaper because it doesn't have the NIC and it also comes in a laptop if that's what you prefer.
bitmasher9 14 hours ago [-]
Is a Microsoft account required to use Windows on these RTX spark laptops?
Am I being too stubborn for not wanting a cloud account tied to my desktop operating system?
tomwheeler 13 hours ago [-]
No, the vendor is being too presumptuous. This is clearly a case of them putting their needs above yours.
colechristensen 13 hours ago [-]
It is getting progressively more difficult to set up a new Windows laptop without a cloud account. Currently it's a pretty esotaric command line prompt if you know the keybinding to get a terminal open.
Aozora7 11 hours ago [-]
The worst it can get is having to reinstall windows with an image modified to run first setup with a local account. Though with a lot of manufacturers it's a good idea to do that anyway to also avoid all of the bloatware they preinstall.
mahboi 13 hours ago [-]
For Win10, I had to keep it disconnected from the network throughout the install process. Once you're connected, you have to do it all over again.
downrightmike 12 hours ago [-]
Win7 was the GOAT
MrDrMcCoy 9 hours ago [-]
Win2k was the best Windows, only gotten worse from there.
mahboi 6 hours ago [-]
Win2K was the best for the time, but it's missing too many useful features for people to want to use it today. Win7 is the best today but is artificially deprecated.
mrheosuper 4 hours ago [-]
Let ask Claude to RE the Win7 and backport new feature to it /s.
mahboi 4 hours ago [-]
Well I already told it to make Win10 shut the hell up about updating to Win11, that worked at least
sippingabonedry 11 hours ago [-]
My takeaway from these complaints is there were 5th graders in the 90s that were more skilled at installing Windows. If you can't find the way around it (10 sec search) the natural reaction is not "I'll install Linux and complicate my life further".
In fact if getting stalled by a single screen in the installer is a showstopper, then you're in for a world of hurt with Linux.
teo_zero 5 hours ago [-]
To be fair, TFA lists more reasons to avoid Windows:
> Mine include the privacy concessions during setup, the years spent waiting for Microsoft to let people put the taskbar on the side of the screen again, and the advertising.
Of course you don't have to agree on all of them, but please don't assume everyone acts only because they can't find a tutorial on the net!
pjmlp 5 hours ago [-]
I fail to see the value, in this specific case.
There are already several OEMs shipping RTX Spark mini PCs with NVIDIA Linux distribution (NVIDIA DGX OS), support them, like Asus.
Instead the message keeps being the same, no value in selling pre-installed Linux devices.
pshc 12 hours ago [-]
Only 30 tok/s on Qwen 3.8 Flash Next? These days thanks to those specialized engines out there I can get ~2x that speed on a 24 GB video card with RAM offload. Thermal limits, I assume...
I wonder how its performance is on dense models.
wmedrano 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah, its pretty low. I get about 60tps with a specialized engine on Strix Halo that runs UD-IQ4_XS with MTP
MrDrMcCoy 9 hours ago [-]
Which engine?
mstkllah 8 hours ago [-]
Which video card? Which specialized engine?
Grimblewald 12 hours ago [-]
memeory bandwidth is typically the limiting factor, not compute. Your card quite likely has 2x or more the bandwidth.
thighbaugh 9 hours ago [-]
> Doing the rationale thing to take advantage of the full capacity of my overpriced hardware
Why would you ever run anything else on equipment like that, which doesn't make any sense to me when enterprise grade hardware that is stationary would be more powerful anyway...because you aren't taking that on BART (I don't steal but seeing that thing in your lap, might bend that rule for myself since no real chance Bart PD would care anyway) or probably ever moving it from the place you use it now in ways that a mobile rack in your garage would be any less convenient for you.
Or if you felt strongly about consumer facing hardware, meaning really you pay through the nose to live in an efficiency in "SoMA" aka the Tenderloin, buy the mini-pc variant is just as easy to move but much less easy to break.
hypfer 13 hours ago [-]
Hm, what's the learning here?
What challenge has been overcome?
I can see that hardware was bought, and that's cool hardware and all, but consumption is rather uninspiring.
I suppose it's the arm64 part?
Or the review of some new hardware other people might be interested in?
swiftcoder 13 hours ago [-]
She literally posted a link to the patches she wrote to get it to boot linux. That seems like it's not nothing
hypfer 13 hours ago [-]
But does it go into detail about those changes?
Because that sounds interesting!
But I didn't see anything like that when I've (admittedly) skimmed through the review.
swiftcoder 6 hours ago [-]
There's an entire GitHub repo, my man, with documentation and all. The article discusses this at some length.
Honestly, this whole line of commentary comes across very gatekeeper-ish. Isn't half of what makes it to the front page people showing off their cool shit?
hypfer 5 hours ago [-]
Well, yeah, that was kinda the point. But also kinda not?
The motivation you're reading into it is incorrect. (And rather un-HN for that matter. Both assuming bad faith and the whole.. uh.. reddit-ness.)
My point is that the linked blogpost is a poor representation of the work they did. And that is bad, because they've shared it themselves. So it makes sense to tell them that it might be a good idea to next time show more of their actual work and less of the stuff everyone else that just bought the machine could've done.
That is negative feedback, yes, but it is not negative to punch down on them, but, ideally, to lift them up. Anyway.
swiftcoder 4 hours ago [-]
> it is not negative to punch down on them, but, ideally, to lift them u
I think some thought is needed on phrasing of your initial comment in this light. It very much comes across as punching down - it's not phrased as "this is cool, but it would be better with A and B", but rather it comes off very dismissively as "this post doesn't have any real value"
hypfer 3 hours ago [-]
No, that's the point.
The spirit of this platform is different. You're wanting it to behave like other social media, where one has to soften everything and constantly glue on all the context one could possibly need just to feel emotionally safe.
Which is why those platforms do not get any useful conversation done, because it is incredibly exhausting.
Please stop trying to terraform this last bastion where capable people can have high-bandwidth interactions down to baseline Internet mediocrity.
You can use literally everything else to get the space that you want. We who don't can only use this.
swiftcoder 3 hours ago [-]
There's nothing low-bandwidth about delivering feedback kindly. Being an asshole isn't some badge of tech-nerd honour.
hypfer 3 hours ago [-]
Now you've just insulted me.
petercooper 13 hours ago [-]
As someone who was intrigued by these new machines but also has no interest in running Windows, I'm quite happy to learn it works. Though admittedly I was expecting to see DGX OS first.
cute_boi 13 hours ago [-]
i would do same if i have to use windows. I will literally pay anything to not use windows, thanks to microslop.
150g2 5 hours ago [-]
Industry of Scam. Industry of Spy.
starfallg 13 hours ago [-]
Does anybody know how Wayland performs on these?
neobrain 4 hours ago [-]
Running Cosmic (which is a Wayland-only DE) on a DGX Spark. It just works.
LoganDark 12 hours ago [-]
> When rumours started circulating about a laptop with over 100 GiB of RAM the GPU could access
That was like three years ago with the release of M3, do you not count MacBooks as laptops or something? Not that you could run Linux on it back then, but you don't even mention the existence of Apple silicon at all?
teo_zero 5 hours ago [-]
> you don't even mention the existence of Apple silicon at all?
Given the reasons she lists for not wanting Windows, I can't imagine her entering Apple's closed garden.
LoganDark 3 hours ago [-]
That's like saying Valve just released the first ever standalone VR headset because the standalones that came before had advertising and trackers (or worse). Or that TVs aren't produced anymore because they all come with similar software. Or cars.
Saying RTX Spark is the first laptop with 128 GB of unified memory just because you don't agree with the previous laptops with 128 GB of unified memory is just incorrect. You could easily make it true with qualifiers but there were none here!
Also did nobody ever release a 128GB Strix Halo laptop? I remember that being a thing around when the Framework Desktop came out? And feels like that'd have even better Linux support than Nvidia? What's the ideological objection to that?
fortran77 10 hours ago [-]
You do know you can get a Microsoft account for free? It would have saved you a lot of trouble.
MrDrMcCoy 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, you can freely surrender your data and control to a hostile corporation. What isn't clear is why someone would want to. What you gain in freedom, control, and privacy is worth the pittance of time required to set up.
dark-star 13 hours ago [-]
simply creating a Microsoft account would have been far quicker and easier ;-)
Grimblewald 12 hours ago [-]
not really, it would simply be the first of many headaches that just get worse as time goes on. Windows is a festering blight, it costs you more and more in bullshit you deal with the longer you have it.
For example, I cannot currentl use the ms suite, like word or excel, because it asks me to log into an institutional account that I dont have, despite my account being the owner of the licenses for the suite running on my laptop. Make that make sense. All because i opened an institutional word document on it, i've tried fully reinstalling, no dice. i've tried nuking caches and registry entries, no dice. Window's basic functionality is indistinguishable from maleware.
ericd 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah, a copy of office I bought bricking myself, even while constantly keeping office autoupdate running was my last straw with them. Fortunately, LibreOffice seems to be mostly good enough now.
SimianSci 13 hours ago [-]
getting a local account is simple.
Windows Pro > Work or School Account > Join a Domain instead > Set password & recovery questions
The one component here that is not present on most machines straight from the manufacturer is the presence of the Pro version.
The home version of windows requires the account with increasingly limited alternatives.
delecti 12 hours ago [-]
As the author mentions in TFA, she's on the Arch staff as a package maintainer. I don't think there was a technical obstacle around the windows setup process.
I wonder. I sort of accidentally discovered that Rufus could edit my arm64 windows 11 install media without problem - adding a local account and bypassing the need for domain login (just as it does for amd64).
This isn't a new trick - just the regular approach to editing windows install media.
delecti 11 hours ago [-]
But that process still results in having Windows 11 installed on the computer. I don't think it's a stretch to assume someone on the Arch Linux staff has reasons for avoiding installing Windows which do not involve an inability to accomplish it.
Telaneo 13 hours ago [-]
Simple™. Easy™.
altrhombus 9 hours ago [-]
also: if you don't set a password during OOBE, you won't be asked for security questions
I don't want a cloud login telemetry of when I am using my computer, an account that can be disabled by a provider, and constant ads to backup to onedrive. I also moved to linux because of this. (was already a linux guy, but Windows is completely in my rear-view now.)
kahnclusions 13 hours ago [-]
Microsoft turns on OneDrive backups by default without your knowledge or consent, sending your private files to MS servers, not only during setup but it can also happen during updates. Even when you try keep it disabled, they constantly pressure you into enabling it every time you login, and make it really easy to accidentally turn it on. Once your files are in OneDrive, MS can access them. Don't be surprised if it later turns out they're training their LLMs on people's private files.
jamiek88 12 hours ago [-]
I haven’t experienced any of this on my win 11 sim racing rig. I wonder why? I was thinking then i remembered - I ran a script I found that removed copilot, and a lot of other shit. Can’t remember the name it was on GitHub. I only use that computer to run iracing and LMU and it’s been updating fine.
Shouldn’t have to do that of course, but it can be done.
MrDrMcCoy 9 hours ago [-]
That is more work and less reliable than setting up Linux.
Coding while flying is often the use case people bring up, but the power brick these laptops come with sometimes trip the plane's power plug in coach and you can't run local AI on battery for long. Also, over time planes will get better connectivity (Starlink etc.) and that particular full-offline scenario will go away.
For gaming, there are better options with dedicated GPUs like the Asus Zephyrus and similar.
What am I missing?
Memory makers are responding with a huge build-out. Building a fab shell and cleanroom takes years, which is why the crunch has lasted so long, but many of these projects are now well underway. New capacity is what ended past memory shortages. New factories going in:
SK hynix
M15X, Cheongju, Korea: first wafers early 2026 (reported), ramping through 2027 Yongin Y1, Korea: first cleanroom Feb 2027 (company target) Yongin Y2, Korea: groundbreaking planned July 2027, first cleanroom June 2029 Micron
ID1, Boise: first wafer output mid-2027 Tongluo, Taiwan: an existing PSMC cleanroom it bought for $1.8B, with meaningful shipments mid-2027 ID2, Boise: late 2028 Hiroshima, Japan: broke ground July 2026, with initial output late 2028 Clay, New York (up to 4 fabs, $100B): broke ground Jan 2026, with first output in 2030 Samsung
P5, Pyeongtaek: mass production 2028 (reported) Yongin national complex: site work began Oct 2026, with the first fab targeting Oct 2029 (reported; Samsung hasn't given a date) Nanya
Fab 5A, New Taipei: 10nm-class EUV DRAM, with wafer starts in 2H 2027 (reported) Tesla / SpaceX (Terafab)
Research fab at Giga Texas, Austin: broke ground April 2026. There's no official output date. Grimes County, Texas (logic, memory, packaging; Phase 1 over $16.8B): land clearing since Aug 2026. Texas filings say commercial operations in 2028, but SemiAnalysis estimates late 2029.
The first real supply relief is 2027, a second wave comes in 2028–29, and a lot of that new capacity is aimed at HBM and server memory, so consumer DDR5 and GDDR will likely ease last.
Sources: Micron FQ4 2026 call, the SK hynix newsroom, TrendForce, Texas JETI filings via ENR, and Tom's Hardware/SemiAnalysis.
It's been like a year-ish...
And maybe 2027 is a truly optimistic relief on some level,
> a second wave comes in 2028–29, and a lot of that new capacity is aimed at HBM and server memory, so consumer DDR5 and GDDR will likely ease last.
'Consumer DDR5' has a pretty big set of knock-on effects though.
Unless you are working at a 'tech' company, the norm is that even developer machines will be constrained on memory usage for a given workload[0][1]. IOW companies trying to keep procurement in check wind up looking at procurement cost vs lost productivity.
[0] - Modern infosec and corporate software, at least where I'm at, seems to be vaguely more efficient than electron apps, IOW I can reboot, open teams and my IDE, after 4GBish of my IDE and 1GB of a fresh Teams instance I'm already around 16 of 32GB.
[1] - I had to fight hard to get 32GB as a developer baseline at my org. They wanted 16GB. Ironically the JVM based devs get 64GB but still have slowdown issues on biuld...
Honestly I think most of us are just spoiled kids crying when our expensive toys are being taken away. If memory cost 10x more to manufacture than it does now, we’d just have 10x less ram in our computers and our software would be written to deal with that. We’ve done it before. My first computer had 4mb of ram and it ran windows 3.1 just fine. We still had working compilers. If ram were 10x cheaper before the supply shock, I think we’d be crying that companies won’t buy us 320gb ram in our laptops. The java and rust compilers would somehow be even less ram efficient. Firefox and chrome would still happily use it all to run adware across the same 50 tabs I want to keep open.
Theres good reason for LLMs to need that much ram. But very little else we do on our computers needs anywhere near as much ram as we use. Have faster computers made video games more fun in the last two decades? I don’t think so.
The supply crisis is annoying. But I’m also a little glad there’s a reason to push back on fat, lazy software.
I work at a place which offers a well-known operating system and also sells hardware which runs said OS. This is exactly what we have done, because the hardware releases this year have had to come with a quarter less memory. There is an internal effort to reduce memory consumption by a quarter at all levels of the platform, from the kernel, to the drivers and user-mode libraries, to the toolkits and user-mode applications. This has been remarkably successful.
If you’re a developer, try promoting Claude to profile and optimise a piece of some piece of software. I routinely see 20-40x improvements with a single prompt and a few hours of opus credits.
Thanks for your work by the way. At a large scale, it is much more efficient for some software developers to do a bit of belt tightening in their code than ask millions of customers to invest in bigger computers. Globally the savings are enormous.
You can buy a version from gog that runs on Windows 10 requiring 2 GB of RAM and an unspecified 1.8GHz CPU [2]
[1] https://www.mocagh.org/origin/u7completeaus-manual.pdf
[2] https://www.gog.com/en/game/ultima_7_complete
It seems like this list also doesn't account for China and state sponsored memory industry (which will be more immune to a downturn)
Good battery life is probably the biggest upside, but the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Zephyrus G16 is just about as good (more on that alternative later).
The downsides are numerous:
- Middling GPU performance compared to discrete RTX mobile GPUs. You’re barely trading blows with an 5070Ti with the top end Spark chip. And yes, Nvidia markets RTX Spark for gaming, so we need to judge them in that context, too. Windows on ARM isn’t amazing for gaming for various reasons including lack of anti-cheat compatibility.
- Compatibility and/or performance issues on Windows ARM. You’re running a lot of stuff non-native
- As you mentioned, the CPU cores are nothing to write home about with very mid single core performance.
- Suffers greatly from “why am I not buying a MacBook Pro?” syndrome
- Poor/no Linux support, in a world where when Linux and Mac get the most attention for AI workflows.
I think there may be a case for being a good performance value for AI training, but for local inference I’m not seeing how that makes sense. Heck, for local inference I think it’s better to run a workstation as a server and then use the laptop as a client. You benefit from a better hardware value as well as putting less of the strain on the laptop, saving battery life. The fact that it’s plugged in means you can run long-running jobs and scheduled tasks, which is often the strength of local AI. The cost of one of these RTX Spark laptops will get you a dual R9700 inference workstation if you’re smart about the build.
You’ve also got projects like Strata that are going to define trends for how people run local AI. Why bother with $6000 integrated graphics machines or trying to squeeze quality models into one or two expensive 24-32GB GPUs when you can get 60 tok/s on Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on a 16GB RX 9060XT ($500) with 64GB of DDR4 RAM?
Want to do local inference on a laptop? Grab a Zephyrus G16, get the 64GB/RTX 5080 spec, run Strata, then as a bonus you can run AAA games at full blast. This costs less than $5000.
Waiting ~1 year for the M7 Pro chip on MacBook Pro models is another option that is almost certainly a better idea if the rumors about that chip are true.
I’m struggling to find a way to find a worse value buying something, anything that isn’t an RTX Spark. For that money there are just so many alternatives.
Well, reading the reviews it's clear these are filling the MacBook Pro gap in windows laptop lineups.
And the answer to "why am I not buying a MacBook Pro?" for many people is because it's a MacBook pro. I've never owned Apple hardware in my life and have no desire to do so now but I do wish there was equivalent quality non Apple hardware (for me that I can run Linux on, but for many people, Windows would be fine). If the price was lower, I'd be in the market for one of these.
So far the only options has been gaming/creator laptops with dedicated GPUs. I currently have an MSI Ge66 and it's a great laptop in many ways but it runs so hot, and the fan is so loud. I'd pay a premium (but not $6000!) to reduce that. Also, the unified memory is a big draw for both Blender and local AI.
Even if your game is running natively and your anti-cheat is supported, you’d have gotten better performance on a Zephyrus G14/G16 for less money.
If you want to do local AI a MacBook Pro is either keeping up or going faster (faster memory bandwidth, token output writes faster), with faster single-core CPU performance as a bonus for general purpose snappiness.
In my eyes, the only buyer left is someone who can’t stand a MacBook Pro, or needs Nvidia/CUDA and a lot of VRAM.
To be more generous to the RTX Spark platform, it does seem to be priced head-to-head with Apple. I just think it has an uphill battle.
10 months ago when I got my Spark it was competitive in price with a similarly spec'd out Mac Studio. As RAM prices have gone even more parabolic, so has its price. And so has the Mac's. And the Strix Halo competitors.
The author’s discussion of their personal use case starts on the seventh sentence in TFA. And frankly, it sounds like a pretty solid use case:
“Being able to run things locally and mess around with RL, quantisation and fine-tuning on a laptop would be sick. I already publish my own GGUF quants on Hugging Face, with over 160,000 downloads in the past month.”
For example, network is not always available and stable; File transferring is limited by connection speed, hardware passthrough is basically nonexistence; Dealing with power management (Unexpected power loss) and so on.
I bet they all can be solved(to some bearable degree), but at that point, just bite a bullet and get a powerful laptop.
I'm sure you can come up with some scenario where you are programming in the wilderness with no internet connection but the market for that has to be in the tens of people.
That said the compute power of the GB10 is awesome, my DGX Spark-like has been better than I expected.
Not everything with AI is LLMs running on llama.cpp.
The massively lopsided compute makes speculative execution techniques (MTP/DFlash etc) way more effective, which makes modern MoE models quite usable
I’m running Qwen 3.8 Flash Next with Nota AI’s conservative NVFP4 quant at 30tk/s lowest decode, usually more around 45-55 for coding, and with prompt processing at a solid 2000tk/s
And that’s without very optimised kernels or anything, mostly standard vLLM
Tailscale is the key ingredient.
Aside from this, I’m led to believe that the AMD stack when it comes to local models has more overhead related to its need to translate more NVIDIA native instructions and therefore can be less performant than Nvidia. Not sure how true this is anymore, but ive yet to hear otherwise.
A Ryzen AI Max+ 395 powered tablet with 70Wh [0] gets the same battery life given the same task as a Nvidia N1X powered laptop with 99.9 Wh [1].
Power Consumption in their "Cyberpunk / Stress Test" is also lower at Ø109.3 (108.8-110.8) Watt for the x86_64 vs Ø134.5 (132.1-137.5) Watt for the arm64 system using the same settings, resolution and display brightness. They also get the same performance when normalising for resolutions and settings in Cyberpunk, so this is not an instance of one providing significantly more performance.
[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-ROG-Flow-Z13-GZ302EA-Conv...
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-ProArt-P16-RTX-Spark-Lapt...
[1] https://www.lttlabs.com/articles/2026/10/16/nvidia-rtx-spark...
Uh, well you'd just download lemonade server and use models designed explicitly for the hardware from hugging face.
https://lemonade-server.ai/
It's supported by AMD.
but separately everything about Microsoft’s login experience is pure pain.
Multiple broken redirects, broken links, buttons that loop, and more just to hit a CAPTCHA AI can solve anyway.
The only thing worse is for the poor soul developers who have had to login to their dev portal to setup SSO Microsoft for an app. It’s the worst I have ever seen in my life (even using Supabase that hand holds you through it).
(Expired but there was coupon https://slickdeals.net/f/20164014-hp-omnibook-x-14-nvidia-rt...)
3.8k is less than the preorder cost of the DGX Spark over a year ago (Oct 14th, 2025).
I've bought some low-priced things on amazon, just to have them cancelled. Spooky since I figure someone got my name, address, phone number from amazon.
The OS makes a big difference for most developers, and the DGX Spark stack and experience is mature.
Am I being too stubborn for not wanting a cloud account tied to my desktop operating system?
In fact if getting stalled by a single screen in the installer is a showstopper, then you're in for a world of hurt with Linux.
> Mine include the privacy concessions during setup, the years spent waiting for Microsoft to let people put the taskbar on the side of the screen again, and the advertising.
Of course you don't have to agree on all of them, but please don't assume everyone acts only because they can't find a tutorial on the net!
There are already several OEMs shipping RTX Spark mini PCs with NVIDIA Linux distribution (NVIDIA DGX OS), support them, like Asus.
Instead the message keeps being the same, no value in selling pre-installed Linux devices.
I wonder how its performance is on dense models.
Why would you ever run anything else on equipment like that, which doesn't make any sense to me when enterprise grade hardware that is stationary would be more powerful anyway...because you aren't taking that on BART (I don't steal but seeing that thing in your lap, might bend that rule for myself since no real chance Bart PD would care anyway) or probably ever moving it from the place you use it now in ways that a mobile rack in your garage would be any less convenient for you.
Or if you felt strongly about consumer facing hardware, meaning really you pay through the nose to live in an efficiency in "SoMA" aka the Tenderloin, buy the mini-pc variant is just as easy to move but much less easy to break.
What challenge has been overcome?
I can see that hardware was bought, and that's cool hardware and all, but consumption is rather uninspiring.
I suppose it's the arm64 part? Or the review of some new hardware other people might be interested in?
Because that sounds interesting! But I didn't see anything like that when I've (admittedly) skimmed through the review.
Honestly, this whole line of commentary comes across very gatekeeper-ish. Isn't half of what makes it to the front page people showing off their cool shit?
My point is that the linked blogpost is a poor representation of the work they did. And that is bad, because they've shared it themselves. So it makes sense to tell them that it might be a good idea to next time show more of their actual work and less of the stuff everyone else that just bought the machine could've done.
That is negative feedback, yes, but it is not negative to punch down on them, but, ideally, to lift them up. Anyway.
I think some thought is needed on phrasing of your initial comment in this light. It very much comes across as punching down - it's not phrased as "this is cool, but it would be better with A and B", but rather it comes off very dismissively as "this post doesn't have any real value"
The spirit of this platform is different. You're wanting it to behave like other social media, where one has to soften everything and constantly glue on all the context one could possibly need just to feel emotionally safe.
Which is why those platforms do not get any useful conversation done, because it is incredibly exhausting.
Please stop trying to terraform this last bastion where capable people can have high-bandwidth interactions down to baseline Internet mediocrity.
You can use literally everything else to get the space that you want. We who don't can only use this.
That was like three years ago with the release of M3, do you not count MacBooks as laptops or something? Not that you could run Linux on it back then, but you don't even mention the existence of Apple silicon at all?
Given the reasons she lists for not wanting Windows, I can't imagine her entering Apple's closed garden.
Saying RTX Spark is the first laptop with 128 GB of unified memory just because you don't agree with the previous laptops with 128 GB of unified memory is just incorrect. You could easily make it true with qualifiers but there were none here!
Also did nobody ever release a 128GB Strix Halo laptop? I remember that being a thing around when the Framework Desktop came out? And feels like that'd have even better Linux support than Nvidia? What's the ideological objection to that?
For example, I cannot currentl use the ms suite, like word or excel, because it asks me to log into an institutional account that I dont have, despite my account being the owner of the licenses for the suite running on my laptop. Make that make sense. All because i opened an institutional word document on it, i've tried fully reinstalling, no dice. i've tried nuking caches and registry entries, no dice. Window's basic functionality is indistinguishable from maleware.
Windows Pro > Work or School Account > Join a Domain instead > Set password & recovery questions
The one component here that is not present on most machines straight from the manufacturer is the presence of the Pro version. The home version of windows requires the account with increasingly limited alternatives.
https://archlinux.org/people/package-maintainers/#josie
This isn't a new trick - just the regular approach to editing windows install media.
Shouldn’t have to do that of course, but it can be done.
Not defending MS btw.
Also that means you're forced into a manditory arbitration clase and a class action waver.