[HN Gopher] Dell's version of the DGX Spark fixes pain points
___________________________________________________________________
Dell's version of the DGX Spark fixes pain points
Author : thomasjb
Score : 64 points
Date : 2026-01-01 19:11 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com)
| kachapopopow wrote:
| Dell fixing issues instead of creating new ones? That's a new one
| for me. Would rather still not deal with their firmware updaters
| thought.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Give them a chance, I'm sure they'll add new issues in one of
| their monthly bios updates.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| nothing beats perfectly good vendor firmware updates packaged
| in an obscenely complicated bash file that just extracts the
| tool and runs it while performing unnecessary and often
| broken validation that only runs on hardware that is part of
| their ecosystem (ex: dell nic on non dell chassis).
| Tepix wrote:
| You can get two Strix Halo PCs with similar specs for that $4000
| price. I just hope that prompt preprocessing speeds will continue
| to improve, because Strix Halo is still quite slow in that
| regard.
|
| Then there is the networking. While Strix Halo systems come with
| two USB4 40Gbit/s ports, it's difficult to
|
| a) connect more than 3 machines with two ports each
|
| b) get more than 23GBit/s or so per connection, if you're lucky.
| Latency will also be in the 0.2ms range, which leaves room for
| improvement.
|
| Something like Apple's RDMA via Thunderbolt would be great to
| have on Strix Halo...
| Aurornis wrote:
| The primary advantage of the DGX box is that it gives you
| access to the nVidia ecosystem. You can develop against it
| almost like a mini version of the big servers you're targeting.
|
| It's not really intended to be a great value box for running
| LLMs at home. Jeff Geerling talks about this in the article.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Exactly this. I'm not sure why people keep drumming the "a
| Mac or Strix Halo is faster/cheaper" drum. Different market.
|
| If I want to do hobby / amateur AI research or do stuff with
| fine tuning models etc, learn the tooling. I'm better off
| with the DG10 than AMD or Apple's systems.
|
| The Strix Halo machines look nice. I'd like one of those
| _too_. Especially if /when they ever get around to getting it
| into a compelling laptop.
|
| But I ordered the ASUS Ascent DG10 machine (since it was more
| easily available for me than the other versions of these)
| because I want to play around with fine tuning open weight
| models, learning tooling, etc.
|
| That and I like the idea of having a (non-Apple) Aarch64
| linux workstation at home.
|
| Now if the courier would just get their shit together and
| actually deliver the thing...
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| I have this device, it's exactly as you say. This is a
| device for AI research and development. My buddies mac
| ultra beats it squarely for inference workloads, but for
| real tinkering it can't be beat.
|
| I've used it to fine tune 20+ models in the last couple of
| weeks. Neither a Mac or Strix Halo even try to compete.
| coder543 wrote:
| As you allude, the prompt processing speeds are a killer
| improvement of the Spark which even 2 Strix Halo boxes would
| not match.
|
| Prompt processing is literally 3x to 4x higher on GPT-OSS-120B
| once you are a little bit into your context window, and it is
| similarly much faster for image generation or any other AI
| task.
|
| Plus the Nvidia ecosystem, as others have mentioned.
|
| One discussion with benchmarks:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1oonomc/comment...
|
| If all you care about is token generation with a tiny context
| window, then they are very close, but that's basically the only
| time. I studied this problem extensively before deciding what
| to buy, and I wish Strix Halo had been the better option.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| I've got the Dell version of the DGX Spark as well, and was very
| impressed with the build quality overall. Like Jeff Geerling
| noted, the fans are super quiet. And since I don't keep it
| powered on continuously and mainly connect to it remotely, the
| LED is a nice quick check for power.
|
| But the nicest addition Dell made in my opinion is the retro 90's
| UNIX workstation-style wallpaper:
| https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/grace-blackwell/
| ranger_danger wrote:
| I just want a standard, affordable mini PC that looks like this
| one. Or better yet, with the brown accents normally found on
| recent PowerEdge systems.
|
| https://www.fsi-embedded.jp/contents/uploads/2018/11/DELLEMC...
| storus wrote:
| Zotac has a bunch of x64 mini PCs that use a similar
| hexagonal styling.
| alecco wrote:
| IMHO DGX Spark at $4,000 is a bad deal with only 273 GB/s
| bandwidth and the compute capacity between a 5070 and a 5070 TI.
| And with PCIe 5.0 at 64 GB/s it's not such a big difference.
|
| And the 2x 200 GBit/s QSFP... why would you stack a bunch of
| these? Does anybody actually use them in day-to-day
| work/research?
|
| I liked the idea until the final specs came out.
| colordrops wrote:
| I assume they didn't fix the memory bandwidth pain point though.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| The memory bandwidth limitation is baked into the GB10, and
| every vendor is going to be very similar there.
|
| I'm really curious to see how things shift when the M5 Ultra
| with "tensor" matmul functionality in the GPU cores rolls out.
| This should be a multiples speed up of that platform.
| storus wrote:
| My guess is M5 Ultra will be like DGX Spark for token prefill
| and M3 Ultra for token generation, i.e. the best of both
| worlds, at FP4. Right now you can combine Spark with M3U, the
| former streaming the compute, lowering TTFT, the latter doing
| the token generation part; with M5U that should no longer be
| necessary. However given RAM prices situation I am wondering
| if M5U will ever get close to the price/performance of Spark
| + M3U we have right now.
| dagaci wrote:
| A nice little AI review with comparison of the CPU/Power Draw &
| Networking would be interested in seeing a fine-tuning comparison
| too. I think pricing was missing also.
| npalli wrote:
| Seems you are paying the Dell tax of 15%. The same setup is $4K
| from NVidia, Lenovo and $3K for 1TB at Asus.
|
| https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/dell-pro-m...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-01 23:00 UTC)