Industrial demand
Nvidia’s DGX chips are in high demand in industry, though, and it’s more likely that Micro Center’s one-Spark limit is to prevent businesses scooping them up by the rack-load to run AI applications in their data centers.
The DGX Spark contains an Nvidia GB10 Grace Blackwell chip, 128GB of unified system memory, a ConnectX-7 smart NIC for connecting two Spark’s in parallel, and up to 4TB of storage in a package just 150mm (about 6 inches) square.
It consumes 240W of electrical power and delivers 1 petaflop of performance at FP4 precision — that’s one million billion floating point operations with four-bit precision per second. In comparison, Nvidia said, its original DGX-1 supercomputer based on its Pascal chip architecture and launched in 2016 delivered 170 teraflops (170,000 billion operations per second) at FP16 precision, but cost $129,000 and consumed 3,200W. It also weighed 60kg, compared to the Spark’s 1.2kg or 2.65 pounds.
Nvidia won’t be the only company selling compact systems based on the DGX Spark design: It said that partner systems will be available from Acer, Asus, Dell Technologies, Gigabyte, HP, Lenovo, and MSI.
This article originally appeared on Computerworld.
