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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

I’m not in this space, so I don’t know what’s normal, but I guess I’m a little surprised to see only 10 gig Ethernet for high speed connectivity.

Yeah, it’s miles better than WiFi. But if there was something I’d think maybe benefit from Thunderbolt this would’ve been it.

The ability to transfer large models or datasets that way just seems like it would be much faster and a real win for some customers.

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This thing has a ConnectX-7, which gives it 2 x 200 Gbps networking. The 10 gig port is far from the fastest network interface on the Spark.

But can you hook that up to a normal PC?

You were complaining about speed. Yes, a PC can have the same ports, and then you get much faster speeds than Thunderbolt can provide.

Why would you ever want a DGX Spark to talk to a “normal PC” at 40+ Gbps speeds anyways? The normal PC has nothing that interesting to share with it.

But, yes, the DGX Spark does have four USB4 ports which support 40Gbps each, the same as Thunderbolt 4. I still don’t see any use case for connecting one of those to a normal PC.

Yes. Just buy the Mellanox card. We had a bunch of ConnectX 5 hooked up through SFP. Needs cooling but fast.

why criticize something in the first place when you clearly have not even looked at the product?

You’re almost always going to bottleneck on your home internet or upstream ISP, rather than this local interface. That being said, you aren’t going to be waiting too long either way, depending on download speed. Deepseek R1 is 671GB. Multiply by 8 to get into bits: 5368Gb At full 10gbps (which, again, you probably won’t get): 5368Gb / 10gbps = 537 seconds to download 537s / 60 = 8.95 minutes. Call it 10m with overhead.

I think I interviewed you the other day and you didn’t get the job…

What?

I have 25 Gbps symmetric ethernet from my ISP (not XGPON). they are talking about rolling out 100 Gbps.

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