14 pointsby BeetleB3 hours ago5 comments
  • jsiepkes2 hours ago
    Going to be interesting to see if these machines will be capable of running anything else than Windows. Or if they are either so incompatible (no UEFI, etc.) or so locked down they can't run anything else.
    • pjmlp5 minutes ago
      Even if that is the case, as per my comments, Windows is my main OS driver despite its flaws, and I have not found any ARM laptop that I would bother buying.

      On the GNU/Linux side, the only thing has been Chromebooks, which aren't worth their money for the usual 4/8 GB, 126 GB, average SOC, most devices have.

    • yjftsjthsd-han hour ago
      It was my impression that Windows had a requirement on UEFI to boot on ARM? Or is that not true?
      • altfreddan hour ago
        I have seen few cases where UEFI was not actually usable on non-OEM configurations.

        In fact, my current ASUS laptop did not allow me to install Windows until I have performed a sophisticated dance to update/flash some sort of low-level disk-related Intel bloatware. The laptop was sold without OS and was accompanied by a small paper referencing a website with instruction how to flash the firmware to actually make the laptop usable.

  • AlotOfReadingan hour ago
    Nvidia doesn't have a fantastic record for long term support on their SoCs. It usually ends up stranded on some outdated out-of-tree kernel. If they've shared the support task with Microsoft (and if MS remains institutionally capable of support at this point...), that's a reason for cautious optimism.

    I don't think this is likely to truly pan out though. I can't imagine Nvidia making the kind of afffordances that would allow it to develop into a successful market segment. They're inevitably going to gatekeep documentation and aggressively encroach on their partners' margin like they always do.

    • skavi5 minutes ago
      These guys aren’t going to use L4T. ACPI compliant, standard GPU drivers. They’ve also upstreamed a lot of the L4T patches.

      See DGX Spark.

    • comexan hour ago
      Windows has a stable hardware abstraction layer for kernel drivers. Unlike on Linux, once Nvidia writes the drivers, the same code can just keep working without requiring constant updates to deal with breaking changes. I don’t have experience with it myself, and I’m sure some ongoing maintenance will be required to deal with bugs, but probably a fraction of what is needed on Linux.

      Meanwhile, if Nvidia is writing its own drivers then documentation isn’t an issue.

      The flipside is that stable APIs make it harder for Microsoft to improve the kernel. And once Nvidia decides to stop maintaining its drivers, without public source code or documentation, nobody else can maintain them in its place. Still, there’s something to be said for Microsoft’s approach.

  • pjmlp2 hours ago
    Remains to be seen, as proven by similar attempts since Windows 8.

    Being NVidia, it better deliver an experience that makes gaming worthwhile in performance of AAA titles.

  • jauntywundrkind2 hours ago
    The real question to me is whether they're going to challenge Strix Halo with a high bandwidth GPU.

    N1/N1X gpu is rumored to get near 5070-ish speeds! That would be a remarkable feat if true!! 5070 has 670 GB/s (via 192-bit, 1.75GHz GDDR7) memory to do what it does. That's more than twice the bandwidth Strix Halo and DGX Spark offer! That would be very interesting to see in a mobile chip.

    Next gen Medusa Halo from AMD is going from quad to hex-channel DDR5: that'll be a bump. But still way short of a 5070's bandwidth, and still likely far more than a year out.

    In all likelihood these rumors are probably ridiculously wrong. Nvidia is charging $4000 for DGX spark systems. It's unlikely that this is going to be a vastly more expensive system. It also seems improbable that it's going to be cheaper and vastly more performant. But for a little while longer, i can dream.

  • adgjlsfhk12 hours ago
    they're going to have a hard time challenging Intel with only 8 laptops...
    • andrewstuart2an hour ago
      Apple does a decent job off challenging Intel with just a few laptops. I suppose it depends on your definition of laptop vs specs. Kinda hard to find out what they mean in TFA with the paywall.
      • Traubenfuchsan hour ago
        Apple has billions of laptops though.