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.
This story originally appeared on Computerworld
