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Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

I would love to try out one of the mini-PCs that ship this, but they seem to be made of either platinum (hugely overpriced in EU) or unobtainium (no retailers carry them here, and getting something direct from China is dicey warranty-wise). ROCm 7 looks to be working already under most Linux distros and having this as a workstation with a local LLM or a “home inference server” with Ollama and a few services seems like a great solution.

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Have you looked at Corsair's AI Workstation 300 Desktop PC? [1] It's 2000-2700 EURO depending on model, and taking VAT into consideration it's comparable to the 1700-2300 USD pretax prices.

[1]: https://www.corsair.com/eu/en/c/ai-workstations

No, but it falls into the platinum side of the equation. I can rent a cloud GPU for a few hours a month and come out ahead.

If the economics don't work out, perhaps this product is not for you and you're better off renting.

I don't think there's any computer hardware that is now economical to buy and use a couple hours a month than to rent

I generally agree with gp. Checkout with your link says "This item is currently on pre-order" btw. Retail mini-pcs are somehow harder to obtain than general purpose ones.

probably because chip itself is shipped somewhere with "bigger margin" product

mini pc with that much compute power is only enthusiast home lab mainly audience

any enterprise or regular homelab wouldn't even need it hence why its hard to have it available

Seems about the same price as the Minisforum MS-S1 Max and Framework Desktop in that case.

This one seems relatively cheap and ships from Germany

https://www.bosgamepc.com/products/bosgame-m5-ai-mini-deskto...

I ordered the framework desktop 395 - 128Gb edition for just under 1900 eur. With some extras I paid just over 2000 incl shipping to EU. Didn’t feel overpriced to me.

I looked just now and it cost 2500 euro without any storage.

Was it on sale or something?

Huh, indeed, above 2300 eur now. I made a deposit earlier this year and it shipped in August, didn’t see the price increased.

ROCm is making great progress but I’ve had enough hiccups (desktop with RX9070XT) that I’d still recommend those looking for AI capability to continue using an Nvidia or Apple solution for the time being.

Still, I think it’ll be quite equivalent soon.

I think one of the best AI systems in terms of price/performance is still just to build a desktop with dual RTX 3090’s (of course you’ll need an board that supports dual cards) and toss it in a closet.

It depends on what you are doing. A lot of people who want to do local inference want to do it using much larger models than what can be fit onto a RTX3090, and Strix Halo is such a hit because it gives you reasonable (not great, but good enough to not be outright painful) performance with 128GB of memory.

Also, Vulkan is great, and much more stable. Plus tends to work great for new, and even very old, graphics cards.

At this point Vulkan will just take over. AMD and Intel are fumbling ROCm and SYCL, whereas Vulkan already ships nearly everywhere.

> ROCm is making great progress

is the progress in the room with us?

Yes? For example, ROCm on MI355X is working fine a month after release; it didn't take a year.

iiuc the high price is mostly from the high bandwidth memory. (which isn't actually that high bandwidth compared to actual GPUs)

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