It's not weird at all, they know people will buy these laptops, put linux on them and stash them in data-centers, so they are trying to prevent this.
I was genuinely excited about this device until I heard the specs. Still under 300GB/s memory bandwidth when a gpu like rtx3090 from 6 years ago had 900+
This is really bread crumbing local inference users.
We should be measuring our memory bandwidth in TB by now. The only company that seems to be serious about this is Apple. (the m5 ultra studio etc).
Or RTX Spark and run their workloads under WSL, which as the article notes, has minimal overhead relative to running Linux directly?
This sounds more like a bug than a feature, especially given that Linux on battery runs at full clock speed and downclocks when plugged in, and Windows does the opposite, suggesting they could at least mitigate the problem with no changes to their software stack by inverting a conditional in the firmware and adding a Linux kernel parameter to control memory allocation as apparently already exists for Windows.
The only value proposition of RTX Spark at all is the laptop form factor
> NVIDIA has now confirmed an official starting price of $2,399 for RTX Spark laptops
https://shattered.io/nvidia-rtx-spark-mediatek-oems-price-20...
https://www.servethehome.com/nvidia-dgx-spark-64gb-launched-...
If we look at what you can actually buy the 64GB RTX Spark is $4,500 and the 128GB one is $7,000: https://eshop.asus.com/us/31150-us-cnf-auto.html & https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptop-computers/spd/xps16dx...
Hell there doesn't seem to be an RTX Spark that's sub $3,300 when considering the 32GB models even. $2,399 is pure fiction.
And if there's a market for a DGX Spark configuration with a higher compute-to-RAM ratio, why isn't Nvidia offering it?
My best guess is that the entry-level Sparks are mostly intended for people who would otherwise be in the market for a traditional high-end laptop, who might be enticed to spend a few hundred more for at least the promise of local AI, while the higher-end models are intended for more serious AI development.
With that said, it's not hard to imagine there isn't nearly as large a built-in market for high-end SFF Linux PCs as there is for high-end Windows laptops.
In fact I'm pretty sure it's happening. Why? Because of constantly growing prices of those things.
Nvidia does something to prevent abuse so that regular people who want the laptops can buy one. Nvidia gets knocked on.
This is all but certainly a bug in their linux driver and nothing else. It sure as hell isn't some "anti abuse" to enable "regular people" to buy one.