Not sure there's a strong use case for one of these $6K laptops yet, considering you can get a mini PC running AMD Ryzen 495 or 395 with 96, 128 and 192 GB of memory for similar amount of money and connect remotely from a cheaper/smaller/more battery-efficient laptop. Microsoft also has this same chip in non-laptop form factor: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-rtx-....
Coding while flying is often the use case people bring up, but the power brick these laptops come with sometimes trip the plane's power plug in coach and you can't run local AI on battery for long. Also, over time planes will get better connectivity (Starlink etc.) and that particular full-offline scenario will go away.
For gaming, there are better options with dedicated GPUs like the Asus Zephyrus and similar.
The AMD hardware is x86_64, which means lower battery life on average for normal users, and as an architecture, it is very well supported across the Windows ecosystem.
The RTX Spark is ARM64, which means more efficient power management at the cost of a small hit to sustained performance loads. But comes at the cost of being less supported when it comes to available software packages.
Aside from this, I’m led to believe that the AMD stack when it comes to local models has more overhead related to its need to translate more NVIDIA native instructions and therefore can be less performant than Nvidia.
Not sure how true this is anymore, but ive yet to hear otherwise.
> The AMD hardware is x86_64, which means lower battery life on average for normal users [...]
A Ryzen AI Max+ 395 powered tablet with 70Wh [0] gets the same battery life given the same task as a Nvidia N1X powered laptop with 99.9 Wh [1].
Power Consumption in their "Cyberpunk / Stress Test" is also lower at Ø109.3 (108.8-110.8) Watt for the x86_64 vs Ø134.5 (132.1-137.5) Watt for the arm64 system using the same settings, resolution and display brightness. They also get the same performance when normalising for resolutions and settings in Cyberpunk, so this is not an instance of one providing significantly more performance.
To add, battery life on this chip hasn’t been that impressive [1]. It’s basically matching recent MacBook Pros, while sporting a significantly larger battery. Both AMD and Intel have made significant strides in improving power consumption on their latest core designs, to the point where there isn’t a lot of difference anymore.
> Aside from this, I’m led to believe that the AMD stack when it comes to local models has more overhead related to its need to translate more NVIDIA native instructions and therefore can be less performant than Nvidia. Not sure how true this is anymore, but ive yet to hear otherwise.
Uh, well you'd just download lemonade server and use models designed explicitly for the hardware from hugging face.
Why? Flying business everywhere is substantially more expensive than a one time cost of $6k for a laptop. A single business ticket anywhere overseas matches or exceeds that in most cases.
What? I have spent $10k on a computer but would never fly business or first class, that shit is way too expensive. Two trips would buy a new $10k computer!
but you're in a position to understand now, that people who do fly business everywhere, can also afford one of these laptops for a fraction of what they spend flying. that's the use case.
my style of discussing things (let's call it "give credit to your interlocuters") doesn't work on this site.
this discussion is filled with people who love high performance computing, and they are mostly saying "I wouldn't buy this" and the reason "too expensive" and they compared it to "business class". my comment was in response to a sharer of that sentiment. (I picked onesuch comment since there is no way to reply to all of them) and pointed out "if you come at this from the other direction, you can see a population of people who will buy it, business class that you consider to be overpriced is full".
>That doesn’t mean the people that buy this laptop fly business class
I didn't say it did.
you should look at the totally of comments and consider "in what way way can this comment be considered correct" rather than looking for ways to say things are incorrect because you didn't anticipate what was going to be said.
Last first class ticket I bought was US$13k, or a bit less than $500/hr in the air for the trip I took. A 6k laptop that I'm gonna use for 8-12 hrs/day for a couple of years is a rounding error in comparison.
The Nvidia based one uses the memory for the GPU allowing you to run AI models on the GPU, the system you're talking about has no such setup. These are Nvidia powered laptops that do what Apple does with their laptops where the system and GPU VRAM are shared as needed, except the idea here is that Nvidia designed these to perform very well for local inference, at least, that's how I understand it.
Yes, but in practice it’s more interesting than that
The massively lopsided compute makes speculative execution techniques (MTP/DFlash etc) way more effective, which makes modern MoE models quite usable
I’m running Qwen 3.8 Flash Next with Nota AI’s conservative NVFP4 quant at 30tk/s lowest decode, usually more around 45-55 for coding, and with prompt processing at a solid 2000tk/s
And that’s without very optimised kernels or anything, mostly standard vLLM
Depending on what you are doing you may find all the models are written for CUDA though. I'm playing with gaussian splatting and it's like that. Codex is doing a good job porting stuff to Metal, but it would be easier & faster if I had Nvidia hardware to just run the models natively.
Not everything with AI is LLMs running on llama.cpp.
Maybe you have some malware or they have some targeted thing running, clicking the testimonials does nothing at all for me. I'll request to remove it just in case.
The core design is also approaching 3 years old at this point, so it’s not really even that competitive with the latest stuff out of the other chip makers. It’s fine, but nothing to write home about. Certainly not worth the crazy premium Nvidia is charging for it.
I feel like even if a next generation of chips dropped tomorrow, it'd be a while until they can scale up production and actually start selling products you or I could realistically purchase and by that time this new generation chip would already by a couple of years old with something much better and powerful in the final stages of design.
If it's anything like my DGX Spark, the "premium" is almost 100% just the memory cost, not the GPU or ARM core.
10 months ago when I got my Spark it was competitive in price with a similarly spec'd out Mac Studio. As RAM prices have gone even more parabolic, so has its price. And so has the Mac's. And the Strix Halo competitors.
I don’t even really think it’s “fine.” It’s hard to even understand who they are for. Just Josh Tech on YouTube did a great review of these laptops as they’re hitting the market.
Good battery life is probably the biggest upside, but the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Zephyrus G16 is just about as good (more on that alternative later).
The downsides are numerous:
- Middling GPU performance compared to discrete RTX mobile GPUs. You’re barely trading blows with an 5070Ti with the top end Spark chip. And yes, Nvidia markets RTX Spark for gaming, so we need to judge them in that context, too. Windows on ARM isn’t amazing for gaming for various reasons including lack of anti-cheat compatibility.
- Compatibility and/or performance issues on Windows ARM. You’re running a lot of stuff non-native
- As you mentioned, the CPU cores are nothing to write home about with very mid single core performance.
- Suffers greatly from “why am I not buying a MacBook Pro?” syndrome
- Poor/no Linux support, in a world where when Linux and Mac get the most attention for AI workflows.
I think there may be a case for being a good performance value for AI training, but for local inference I’m not seeing how that makes sense. Heck, for local inference I think it’s better to run a workstation as a server and then use the laptop as a client. You benefit from a better hardware value as well as putting less of the strain on the laptop, saving battery life. The fact that it’s plugged in means you can run long-running jobs and scheduled tasks, which is often the strength of local AI. The cost of one of these RTX Spark laptops will get you a dual R9700 inference workstation if you’re smart about the build.
You’ve also got projects like Strata that are going to define trends for how people run local AI. Why bother with $6000 integrated graphics machines or trying to squeeze quality models into one or two expensive 24-32GB GPUs when you can get 60 tok/s on Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on a 16GB RX 9060XT ($500) with 64GB of DDR4 RAM?
Want to do local inference on a laptop? Grab a Zephyrus G16, get the 64GB/RTX 5080 spec, run Strata, then as a bonus you can run AAA games at full blast. This costs less than $5000.
Waiting ~1 year for the M7 Pro chip on MacBook Pro models is another option that is almost certainly a better idea if the rumors about that chip are true.
I’m struggling to find a way to find a worse value buying something, anything that isn’t an RTX Spark. For that money there are just so many alternatives.
Lack of anti cheat is rather outdated perception of Windows on Arm. Most popular competitive games like League of Legends have native arm versions now.
The problem is more holistic. It’s a buyer persona problem.
Even if your game is running natively and your anti-cheat is supported, you’d have gotten better performance on a Zephyrus G14/G16 for less money.
If you want to do local AI a MacBook Pro is either keeping up or going faster (faster memory bandwidth, token output writes faster), with faster single-core CPU performance as a bonus for general purpose snappiness.
In my eyes, the only buyer left is someone who can’t stand a MacBook Pro, or needs Nvidia/CUDA and a lot of VRAM.
To be more generous to the RTX Spark platform, it does seem to be priced head-to-head with Apple. I just think it has an uphill battle.
> Suffers greatly from “why am I not buying a MacBook Pro?” syndrome
Well, reading the reviews it's clear these are filling the MacBook Pro gap in windows laptop lineups.
And the answer to "why am I not buying a MacBook Pro?" for many people is because it's a MacBook pro. I've never owned Apple hardware in my life and have no desire to do so now but I do wish there was equivalent quality non Apple hardware (for me that I can run Linux on, but for many people, Windows would be fine). If the price was lower, I'd be in the market for one of these.
So far the only options has been gaming/creator laptops with dedicated GPUs. I currently have an MSI Ge66 and it's a great laptop in many ways but it runs so hot, and the fan is so loud. I'd pay a premium (but not $6000!) to reduce that. Also, the unified memory is a big draw for both Blender and local AI.
I guess this is technically true, as the specs/prices seem to line up closely with a MacBook Pro.
Although, the thing is, for the AI tasks advertised, the MacBook Pros have faster memory, so token decode runs faster.
Then by using a Mac you also scuttle the issue of "My platform has a low rate of adoption" that Windows on ARM has had. That issue will get better over time but in the present it's still an issue.
As for the dedicated GPU gaming laptop market, you'd be surprised how it's evolved since the release date of your MSI Ge66. I mentioned the 2026 Zephyrus G16 specifically because it is a laptop with very few compromises, including heat and noise. If you don't specifically need a huge amount of GPU-addressable RAM, and you're just looking for good performance in games and graphics-intensive applications, it is a clearly better buy than these RTX Spark systems. As a bonus, being an X86 system you'll have a much easier getting Linux going on that one.
So, yes, it's good that there is another MacBook Pro alternative, but I think the issue remains that it's unclear who exactly the buyer persona is going to be. I think a lot of people in the venn diagram are going to just go with a MacBook Pro.
This part is more speculation on my part, but if Apple brings out the M7 Pro/Max chips on the rumored 2027 schedule, I think they will really blowpast RTX Spark at a time when it will take Nvidia years to have an equivalent answer.
It will also be curious to see if AMD can catch back up Medusa Halo launching next year. If that is anything close to RTX Spark it will sidestep the Windows on ARM issue entirely and look like a pretty attractive alternative. Hopefully AMD actually gets it put into a wide selection of laptops this time around.
The strong case is pretty much only if you can't wait another 3-4 years for ram prices to come back down.
Memory makers are responding with a huge build-out. Building a fab shell and cleanroom takes years, which is why the crunch has lasted so long, but many of these projects are now well underway. New capacity is what ended past memory shortages. New factories going in:
SK hynix
M15X, Cheongju, Korea: first wafers early 2026 (reported), ramping through 2027
Yongin Y1, Korea: first cleanroom Feb 2027 (company target)
Yongin Y2, Korea: groundbreaking planned July 2027, first cleanroom June 2029
Micron
ID1, Boise: first wafer output mid-2027
Tongluo, Taiwan: an existing PSMC cleanroom it bought for $1.8B, with meaningful shipments mid-2027
ID2, Boise: late 2028
Hiroshima, Japan: broke ground July 2026, with initial output late 2028
Clay, New York (up to 4 fabs, $100B): broke ground Jan 2026, with first output in 2030
Samsung
P5, Pyeongtaek: mass production 2028 (reported)
Yongin national complex: site work began Oct 2026, with the first fab targeting Oct 2029 (reported; Samsung hasn't given a date)
Nanya
Fab 5A, New Taipei: 10nm-class EUV DRAM, with wafer starts in 2H 2027 (reported)
Tesla / SpaceX (Terafab)
Research fab at Giga Texas, Austin: broke ground April 2026. There's no official output date.
Grimes County, Texas (logic, memory, packaging; Phase 1 over $16.8B): land clearing since Aug 2026. Texas filings say commercial operations in 2028, but SemiAnalysis estimates late 2029.
The first real supply relief is 2027, a second wave comes in 2028–29, and a lot of that new capacity is aimed at HBM and server memory, so consumer DDR5 and GDDR will likely ease last.
Sources: Micron FQ4 2026 call, the SK hynix newsroom, TrendForce, Texas JETI filings via ENR, and Tom's Hardware/SemiAnalysis.
And maybe 2027 is a truly optimistic relief on some level,
> a second wave comes in 2028–29, and a lot of that new capacity is aimed at HBM and server memory, so consumer DDR5 and GDDR will likely ease last.
'Consumer DDR5' has a pretty big set of knock-on effects though.
Unless you are working at a 'tech' company, the norm is that even developer machines will be constrained on memory usage for a given workload[0][1]. IOW companies trying to keep procurement in check wind up looking at procurement cost vs lost productivity.
[0] - Modern infosec and corporate software, at least where I'm at, seems to be vaguely more efficient than electron apps, IOW I can reboot, open teams and my IDE, after 4GBish of my IDE and 1GB of a fresh Teams instance I'm already around 16 of 32GB.
[1] - I had to fight hard to get 32GB as a developer baseline at my org. They wanted 16GB. Ironically the JVM based devs get 64GB but still have slowdown issues on biuld...
> Unless you are working at a 'tech' company, the norm is that even developer machines will be constrained on memory usage for a given workload
Honestly I think most of us are just spoiled kids crying when our expensive toys are being taken away. If memory cost 10x more to manufacture than it does now, we’d just have 10x less ram in our computers and our software would be written to deal with that. We’ve done it before. My first computer had 4mb of ram and it ran windows 3.1 just fine. We still had working compilers. If ram were 10x cheaper before the supply shock, I think we’d be crying that companies won’t buy us 320gb ram in our laptops. The java and rust compilers would somehow be even less ram efficient. Firefox and chrome would still happily use it all to run adware across the same 50 tabs I want to keep open.
Theres good reason for LLMs to need that much ram. But very little else we do on our computers needs anywhere near as much ram as we use. Have faster computers made video games more fun in the last two decades? I don’t think so.
The supply crisis is annoying. But I’m also a little glad there’s a reason to push back on fat, lazy software.
Realistically, GOG probably is trying to accommodate for the OS running the game. So it is more for the spec of the PC, not the RAM the game itself needs
Well, so its not just bloated software that makes software bloated, but bloated facts, too. Users will see specs like that and go "well, I need to upgrade my machine from 2mb to 8gigs now, d'oh!" ...
I work at a place which offers a well-known operating system and also sells hardware which runs said OS. This is exactly what we have done, because the hardware releases this year have had to come with a quarter less memory. There is an internal effort to reduce memory consumption by a quarter at all levels of the platform, from the kernel, to the drivers and user-mode libraries, to the toolkits and user-mode applications. This has been remarkably successful.
I’m not surprised! The amount of wasted memory and compute in modern software is astounding.
If you’re a developer, try promoting Claude to profile and optimise a piece of some piece of software. I routinely see 20-40x improvements with a single prompt and a few hours of opus credits.
Thanks for your work by the way. At a large scale, it is much more efficient for some software developers to do a bit of belt tightening in their code than ask millions of customers to invest in bigger computers. Globally the savings are enormous.
Cheers; we try, but I wish we didn't have a memory crunch to get this effort going. I suspect at the end of all this we will have more memory-efficient code.
> try promoting Claude to profile
Oh, the irony. Claude is itself an Electron app and lags horribly.
At this point, all these agent apps—Claude, Copilot, ChatGPT—are just calling remote APIs. Why not train them on the native toolkits for each OS (Win32/WinUI3, Cocoa/SwiftUI, GTK, Qt, Jetpack Compose), and make the experience better for users?
I bet these factories exclusively build DDR6 and whatever GDDR is up to next, rather than DDR5, since that was already scheduled for 2027 anyways. Hopefully they don’t immediately shutter their DDR5 facilities rather than cut into their 90% operating margins :)
So do you think there will be a big crash and memory will get really cheap in 2030, or do you believe that AI demand is strong enough to sustain all this buildout?
It seems like this list also doesn't account for China and state sponsored memory industry (which will be more immune to a downturn)
Maybe I'm missing something but didn't micron exit the consumer DDR market for HBM? I don't see a rollback from that. When you say DDR will ease last, in what reality would memory makers go back to a market they left behind?
You could just code on a flight.. No need for llm. Id your brain is incapable of writing code without internet/llms you could write your specs/prompts for when you land.
The author’s discussion of their personal use case starts on the seventh sentence in TFA. And frankly, it sounds like a pretty solid use case:
“Being able to run things locally and mess around with RL, quantisation and fine-tuning on a laptop would be sick. I already publish my own GGUF quants on Hugging Face, with over 160,000 downloads in the past month.”
This is similar to "Why buy powerful gaming laptop when you can build a gaming PC and a cheap laptop to remote into it". That was my setup years ago, and there are a lot of nuance things i hadn't taken into account.
For example, network is not always available and stable; File transferring is limited by connection speed, hardware passthrough is basically nonexistence; Dealing with power management (Unexpected power loss) and so on.
I bet they all can be solved(to some bearable degree), but at that point, just bite a bullet and get a powerful laptop.
The difference is that streaming zero latency 4k video is incredibly difficult and always results in serious compromises. For AI programming, the end output is very small, not latency sensitive very easy to stream over the internet.
I'm sure you can come up with some scenario where you are programming in the wilderness with no internet connection but the market for that has to be in the tens of people.
That when civilization falls, and we have to go to techno agrarian farming, like in Interstellar, the person with the RTX isn't the one that's going to be left behind, it's the person with the cloud account that owns nothing.
Being forced to login to use your own hardware is one issue for sure…
but separately everything about Microsoft’s login experience is pure pain.
Multiple broken redirects, broken links, buttons that loop, and more just to hit a CAPTCHA AI can solve anyway.
The only thing worse is for the poor soul developers who have had to login to their dev portal to setup SSO Microsoft for an app. It’s the worst I have ever seen in my life (even using Supabase that hand holds you through it).
Got stuck in a loop with my work account recently after setting up a passkey. It would cycle through something like 12 different pages, loading then redirecting before eventually ending at “You have been signed out”. Awful
The recovery image of my laptop is based on an old Win11 build where Microsoft login is now broken. So it falls back to local account after failing. Best bug!
I recently tried to recover to stock on the Zenbook A16 I returned and the WiFi wouldn't connect. Had to dig up an old USB Ethernet adapter to make it do the job.
Windows is such a bugs galore it's crazy how people use it as their daily drivers.
I just had a thing today where I wanted to play Forza Horizon 4 on my handheld.
When trying to launch the game I got a "Must sign in to Xbox/Microsoft to play". So I reluctantly complied and entered my password only to be met with "password login not available" after pressing enter.
I've bought some low-priced things on amazon, just to have them cancelled. Spooky since I figure someone got my name, address, phone number from amazon.
I have a DGX Spark (Ubuntu), and when Microsoft and NVIDIA announced the RTX Spark running Windows, I thought to myself: Why would I get that instead of the DGX Spark?
The OS makes a big difference for most developers, and the DGX Spark stack and experience is mature.
I thought so too, but there's a ton of people out there wading their way through trying to re-purpose their gaming rigs to run qwen3.8-flash-next on their gaming rig (at Q2..) via WSL
I have a DGX Spark, a USB-C monitor, a Logitech wireless Touch keyboard/trackpad, and a very fat USB-C battery, in the same backpack alongside a cheap MacBook Air. This portable AI/ML rig is getting a lot of work done in various local environments.
It’s not that heavy a tote - well, it’s heavy. But it’s an acceptable tote given the immense amount of local work that can be done with it, pretty much anywhere in the globe.
(Haven’t got the solar panel thing worked out yet, but yacht is my preferred data center anyway, if you know what I mean..)
i see a lot of complaining about the login part of Win11, and i dont like it either, but i have not seen anyone mention that you can build an autounattend.xml file (generator here: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/) that allows you to bypass all this. I have a USB Key with the file and the latest copy of the 11 Pro download, and when setting up a new machine, i run a fresh install. Then once booted, i run the developer config (https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsDeveloperConfig/) and it gets everything i need installed. No Microsoft Login, no Candy Crush, WSL installed and all the tools i need.
Someone please tell the author thank you for working on that. I hope it gets into normal Arch distribution ASAP.
I recently moved to CachyOS and have been hoping to eventually save up for some kind of laptop (or more likely the cheaper N1 when it comes out, my income is very unstable) like this. I just assumed I would be able to put Linux on it.
I see this new chip/setup as being an obvious technological upgrade and more cost efficient, even though the memory bandwidth is slightly disappointing. But I see it it as a superior and more advanced architecture with the memory sharing and much more efficient integrated chip and more efficient ARM.
To me this is just clearly the logical way to build efficient laptops and PCs now. I do hope that we don't have to wait that long to get something with better memory bandwidth though.
I will admit that the description of prefill times is a little disappointing. Someone please tell the author thank you for working on that. I hope it gets into normal Arch distribution ASAP.
It is getting progressively more difficult to set up a new Windows laptop without a cloud account. Currently it's a pretty esotaric command line prompt if you know the keybinding to get a terminal open.
Win2K was the best for the time, but it's missing too many useful features for people to want to use it today. Win7 is the best today but is artificially deprecated.
The worst it can get is having to reinstall windows with an image modified to run first setup with a local account. Though with a lot of manufacturers it's a good idea to do that anyway to also avoid all of the bloatware they preinstall.
My takeaway from these complaints is there were 5th graders in the 90s that were more skilled at installing Windows. If you can't find the way around it (10 sec search) the natural reaction is not "I'll install Linux and complicate my life further".
In fact if getting stalled by a single screen in the installer is a showstopper, then you're in for a world of hurt with Linux.
To be fair, TFA lists more reasons to avoid Windows:
> Mine include the privacy concessions during setup, the years spent waiting for Microsoft to let people put the taskbar on the side of the screen again, and the advertising.
Of course you don't have to agree on all of them, but please don't assume everyone acts only because they can't find a tutorial on the net!
Only 30 tok/s on Qwen 3.8 Flash Next? These days thanks to those specialized engines out there I can get ~2x that speed on a 24 GB video card with RAM offload. Thermal limits, I assume...
> Doing the rationale thing to take advantage of the full capacity of my overpriced hardware
Why would you ever run anything else on equipment like that, which doesn't make any sense to me when enterprise grade hardware that is stationary would be more powerful anyway...because you aren't taking that on BART (I don't steal but seeing that thing in your lap, might bend that rule for myself since no real chance Bart PD would care anyway) or probably ever moving it from the place you use it now in ways that a mobile rack in your garage would be any less convenient for you.
Or if you felt strongly about consumer facing hardware, meaning really you pay through the nose to live in an efficiency in "SoMA" aka the Tenderloin, buy the mini-pc variant is just as easy to move but much less easy to break.
As someone who was intrigued by these new machines but also has no interest in running Windows, I'm quite happy to learn it works. Though admittedly I was expecting to see DGX OS first.
There's an entire GitHub repo, my man, with documentation and all. The article discusses this at some length.
Honestly, this whole line of commentary comes across very gatekeeper-ish. Isn't half of what makes it to the front page people showing off their cool shit?
Well, yeah, that was kinda the point. But also kinda not?
The motivation you're reading into it is incorrect. (And rather un-HN for that matter. Both assuming bad faith and the whole.. uh.. reddit-ness.)
My point is that the linked blogpost is a poor representation of the work they did. And that is bad, because they've shared it themselves. So it makes sense to tell them that it might be a good idea to next time show more of their actual work and less of the stuff everyone else that just bought the machine could've done.
That is negative feedback, yes, but it is not negative to punch down on them, but, ideally, to lift them up. Anyway.
> it is not negative to punch down on them, but, ideally, to lift them u
I think some thought is needed on phrasing of your initial comment in this light. It very much comes across as punching down - it's not phrased as "this is cool, but it would be better with A and B", but rather it comes off very dismissively as "this post doesn't have any real value"
The spirit of this platform is different. You're wanting it to behave like other social media, where one has to soften everything and constantly glue on all the context one could possibly need just to feel emotionally safe.
Which is why those platforms do not get any useful conversation done, because it is incredibly exhausting.
Please stop trying to terraform this last bastion where capable people can have high-bandwidth interactions down to baseline Internet mediocrity.
You can use literally everything else to get the space that you want. We who don't can only use this.
> When rumours started circulating about a laptop with over 100 GiB of RAM the GPU could access
That was like three years ago with the release of M3, do you not count MacBooks as laptops or something? Not that you could run Linux on it back then, but you don't even mention the existence of Apple silicon at all?
That's like saying Valve just released the first ever standalone VR headset because the standalones that came before had advertising and trackers (or worse). Or that TVs aren't produced anymore because they all come with similar software. Or cars.
Saying RTX Spark is the first laptop with 128 GB of unified memory just because you don't agree with the previous laptops with 128 GB of unified memory is just incorrect. You could easily make it true with qualifiers but there were none here!
Also did nobody ever release a 128GB Strix Halo laptop? I remember that being a thing around when the Framework Desktop came out? And feels like that'd have even better Linux support than Nvidia? What's the ideological objection to that?
Since all non-dedicated GPUs work this way I'd argue this was possible even longer ago. Now one has to question whether those integrated GPUs had any usable computing power. So it's not clear where to draw the line.
I can understand disregarding Apple hardware as they are not general computing devices since they support only a single, locked down OS.
> I can understand disregarding Apple hardware as they are not general computing devices since they support only a single, locked down OS.
Mac is absolutely a general computing device but macOS is the only software that fully supports it currently (Asahi Linux is still trying to get M3 Max and newer working)
Yes, you can freely surrender your data and control to a hostile corporation. What isn't clear is why someone would want to. What you gain in freedom, control, and privacy is worth the pittance of time required to set up.
not really, it would simply be the first of many headaches that just get worse as time goes on. Windows is a festering blight, it costs you more and more in bullshit you deal with the longer you have it.
For example, I cannot currentl use the ms suite, like word or excel, because it asks me to log into an institutional account that I dont have, despite my account being the owner of the licenses for the suite running on my laptop. Make that make sense. All because i opened an institutional word document on it, i've tried fully reinstalling, no dice. i've tried nuking caches and registry entries, no dice. Window's basic functionality is indistinguishable from maleware.
Yeah, a copy of office I bought bricking myself, even while constantly keeping office autoupdate running was my last straw with them. Fortunately, LibreOffice seems to be mostly good enough now.
Windows Pro > Work or School Account > Join a Domain instead > Set password & recovery questions
The one component here that is not present on most machines straight from the manufacturer is the presence of the Pro version.
The home version of windows requires the account with increasingly limited alternatives.
As the author mentions in TFA, she's on the Arch staff as a package maintainer. I don't think there was a technical obstacle around the windows setup process.
I wonder. I sort of accidentally discovered that Rufus could edit my arm64 windows 11 install media without problem - adding a local account and bypassing the need for domain login (just as it does for amd64).
This isn't a new trick - just the regular approach to editing windows install media.
But that process still results in having Windows 11 installed on the computer. I don't think it's a stretch to assume someone on the Arch Linux staff has reasons for avoiding installing Windows which do not involve an inability to accomplish it.
I don't want a cloud login telemetry of when I am using my computer, an account that can be disabled by a provider, and constant ads to backup to onedrive. I also moved to linux because of this. (was already a linux guy, but Windows is completely in my rear-view now.)
Microsoft turns on OneDrive backups by default without your knowledge or consent, sending your private files to MS servers, not only during setup but it can also happen during updates. Even when you try keep it disabled, they constantly pressure you into enabling it every time you login, and make it really easy to accidentally turn it on. Once your files are in OneDrive, MS can access them. Don't be surprised if it later turns out they're training their LLMs on people's private files.
I haven’t experienced any of this on my win 11 sim racing rig. I wonder why? I was thinking then i remembered - I ran a script I found that removed copilot, and a lot of other shit. Can’t remember the name it was on GitHub. I only use that computer to run iracing and LMU and it’s been updating fine.
Shouldn’t have to do that of course, but it can be done.
Not sure there's a strong use case for one of these $6K laptops yet, considering you can get a mini PC running AMD Ryzen 495 or 395 with 96, 128 and 192 GB of memory for similar amount of money and connect remotely from a cheaper/smaller/more battery-efficient laptop. Microsoft also has this same chip in non-laptop form factor: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-rtx-....
Coding while flying is often the use case people bring up, but the power brick these laptops come with sometimes trip the plane's power plug in coach and you can't run local AI on battery for long. Also, over time planes will get better connectivity (Starlink etc.) and that particular full-offline scenario will go away.
For gaming, there are better options with dedicated GPUs like the Asus Zephyrus and similar.
What am I missing?
The AMD hardware is x86_64, which means lower battery life on average for normal users, and as an architecture, it is very well supported across the Windows ecosystem. The RTX Spark is ARM64, which means more efficient power management at the cost of a small hit to sustained performance loads. But comes at the cost of being less supported when it comes to available software packages.
Aside from this, I’m led to believe that the AMD stack when it comes to local models has more overhead related to its need to translate more NVIDIA native instructions and therefore can be less performant than Nvidia. Not sure how true this is anymore, but ive yet to hear otherwise.
> The AMD hardware is x86_64, which means lower battery life on average for normal users [...]
A Ryzen AI Max+ 395 powered tablet with 70Wh [0] gets the same battery life given the same task as a Nvidia N1X powered laptop with 99.9 Wh [1].
Power Consumption in their "Cyberpunk / Stress Test" is also lower at Ø109.3 (108.8-110.8) Watt for the x86_64 vs Ø134.5 (132.1-137.5) Watt for the arm64 system using the same settings, resolution and display brightness. They also get the same performance when normalising for resolutions and settings in Cyberpunk, so this is not an instance of one providing significantly more performance.
[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-ROG-Flow-Z13-GZ302EA-Conv...
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-ProArt-P16-RTX-Spark-Lapt...
To add, battery life on this chip hasn’t been that impressive [1]. It’s basically matching recent MacBook Pros, while sporting a significantly larger battery. Both AMD and Intel have made significant strides in improving power consumption on their latest core designs, to the point where there isn’t a lot of difference anymore.
[1] https://www.lttlabs.com/articles/2026/10/16/nvidia-rtx-spark...
A mini pc doesnt have a battery. Your point doesnt seem very coherent.
> Aside from this, I’m led to believe that the AMD stack when it comes to local models has more overhead related to its need to translate more NVIDIA native instructions and therefore can be less performant than Nvidia. Not sure how true this is anymore, but ive yet to hear otherwise.
Uh, well you'd just download lemonade server and use models designed explicitly for the hardware from hugging face.
https://lemonade-server.ai/
It's supported by AMD.
i don’t think they’re flying coach after spending 6k on a laptop…
Why? Flying business everywhere is substantially more expensive than a one time cost of $6k for a laptop. A single business ticket anywhere overseas matches or exceeds that in most cases.
What? I have spent $10k on a computer but would never fly business or first class, that shit is way too expensive. Two trips would buy a new $10k computer!
but you're in a position to understand now, that people who do fly business everywhere, can also afford one of these laptops for a fraction of what they spend flying. that's the use case.
People in business class can buy this laptop. That doesn’t mean the people that buy this laptop fly business class
my style of discussing things (let's call it "give credit to your interlocuters") doesn't work on this site.
this discussion is filled with people who love high performance computing, and they are mostly saying "I wouldn't buy this" and the reason "too expensive" and they compared it to "business class". my comment was in response to a sharer of that sentiment. (I picked onesuch comment since there is no way to reply to all of them) and pointed out "if you come at this from the other direction, you can see a population of people who will buy it, business class that you consider to be overpriced is full".
>That doesn’t mean the people that buy this laptop fly business class
I didn't say it did.
you should look at the totally of comments and consider "in what way way can this comment be considered correct" rather than looking for ways to say things are incorrect because you didn't anticipate what was going to be said.
Most people flying business class won't buy this. They'd be on a MacBook.
Last first class ticket I bought was US$13k, or a bit less than $500/hr in the air for the trip I took. A 6k laptop that I'm gonna use for 8-12 hrs/day for a couple of years is a rounding error in comparison.
The Nvidia based one uses the memory for the GPU allowing you to run AI models on the GPU, the system you're talking about has no such setup. These are Nvidia powered laptops that do what Apple does with their laptops where the system and GPU VRAM are shared as needed, except the idea here is that Nvidia designed these to perform very well for local inference, at least, that's how I understand it.
No, the AMD ones he’s talking about allow the GPU to address that memory as well: they’re “APU’s” that share system RAM as GPU memory
That said the compute power of the GB10 is awesome, my DGX Spark-like has been better than I expected.
That's the thing, my understanding is that these Nvidia ones are supposed to have very impressive performance.
They're severely hampered by memory bandwidth
Yes, but in practice it’s more interesting than that
The massively lopsided compute makes speculative execution techniques (MTP/DFlash etc) way more effective, which makes modern MoE models quite usable
I’m running Qwen 3.8 Flash Next with Nota AI’s conservative NVFP4 quant at 30tk/s lowest decode, usually more around 45-55 for coding, and with prompt processing at a solid 2000tk/s
And that’s without very optimised kernels or anything, mostly standard vLLM
Depending on what you are doing you may find all the models are written for CUDA though. I'm playing with gaussian splatting and it's like that. Codex is doing a good job porting stuff to Metal, but it would be easier & faster if I had Nvidia hardware to just run the models natively.
Not everything with AI is LLMs running on llama.cpp.
https://zluda.org/ seems to work at near-native performance from what I can find on Google.
Is that the legit site? Clicking the "testimonials" directed me to a link where Opera (with which malware is commonly bundled) auto-downloaded.
Maybe you have some malware or they have some targeted thing running, clicking the testimonials does nothing at all for me. I'll request to remove it just in case.
The core design is also approaching 3 years old at this point, so it’s not really even that competitive with the latest stuff out of the other chip makers. It’s fine, but nothing to write home about. Certainly not worth the crazy premium Nvidia is charging for it.
Yeah but this is all there is until what 2028? 2029? And those could cost 2x-3x too.
May always be behind with how fast things change, you think?
I feel like even if a next generation of chips dropped tomorrow, it'd be a while until they can scale up production and actually start selling products you or I could realistically purchase and by that time this new generation chip would already by a couple of years old with something much better and powerful in the final stages of design.
If it's anything like my DGX Spark, the "premium" is almost 100% just the memory cost, not the GPU or ARM core.
10 months ago when I got my Spark it was competitive in price with a similarly spec'd out Mac Studio. As RAM prices have gone even more parabolic, so has its price. And so has the Mac's. And the Strix Halo competitors.
I don’t even really think it’s “fine.” It’s hard to even understand who they are for. Just Josh Tech on YouTube did a great review of these laptops as they’re hitting the market.
Good battery life is probably the biggest upside, but the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Zephyrus G16 is just about as good (more on that alternative later).
The downsides are numerous:
- Middling GPU performance compared to discrete RTX mobile GPUs. You’re barely trading blows with an 5070Ti with the top end Spark chip. And yes, Nvidia markets RTX Spark for gaming, so we need to judge them in that context, too. Windows on ARM isn’t amazing for gaming for various reasons including lack of anti-cheat compatibility.
- Compatibility and/or performance issues on Windows ARM. You’re running a lot of stuff non-native
- As you mentioned, the CPU cores are nothing to write home about with very mid single core performance.
- Suffers greatly from “why am I not buying a MacBook Pro?” syndrome
- Poor/no Linux support, in a world where when Linux and Mac get the most attention for AI workflows.
I think there may be a case for being a good performance value for AI training, but for local inference I’m not seeing how that makes sense. Heck, for local inference I think it’s better to run a workstation as a server and then use the laptop as a client. You benefit from a better hardware value as well as putting less of the strain on the laptop, saving battery life. The fact that it’s plugged in means you can run long-running jobs and scheduled tasks, which is often the strength of local AI. The cost of one of these RTX Spark laptops will get you a dual R9700 inference workstation if you’re smart about the build.
You’ve also got projects like Strata that are going to define trends for how people run local AI. Why bother with $6000 integrated graphics machines or trying to squeeze quality models into one or two expensive 24-32GB GPUs when you can get 60 tok/s on Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on a 16GB RX 9060XT ($500) with 64GB of DDR4 RAM?
Want to do local inference on a laptop? Grab a Zephyrus G16, get the 64GB/RTX 5080 spec, run Strata, then as a bonus you can run AAA games at full blast. This costs less than $5000.
Waiting ~1 year for the M7 Pro chip on MacBook Pro models is another option that is almost certainly a better idea if the rumors about that chip are true.
I’m struggling to find a way to find a worse value buying something, anything that isn’t an RTX Spark. For that money there are just so many alternatives.
Lack of anti cheat is rather outdated perception of Windows on Arm. Most popular competitive games like League of Legends have native arm versions now.
The problem is more holistic. It’s a buyer persona problem.
Even if your game is running natively and your anti-cheat is supported, you’d have gotten better performance on a Zephyrus G14/G16 for less money.
If you want to do local AI a MacBook Pro is either keeping up or going faster (faster memory bandwidth, token output writes faster), with faster single-core CPU performance as a bonus for general purpose snappiness.
In my eyes, the only buyer left is someone who can’t stand a MacBook Pro, or needs Nvidia/CUDA and a lot of VRAM.
To be more generous to the RTX Spark platform, it does seem to be priced head-to-head with Apple. I just think it has an uphill battle.
> Suffers greatly from “why am I not buying a MacBook Pro?” syndrome
Well, reading the reviews it's clear these are filling the MacBook Pro gap in windows laptop lineups.
And the answer to "why am I not buying a MacBook Pro?" for many people is because it's a MacBook pro. I've never owned Apple hardware in my life and have no desire to do so now but I do wish there was equivalent quality non Apple hardware (for me that I can run Linux on, but for many people, Windows would be fine). If the price was lower, I'd be in the market for one of these.
So far the only options has been gaming/creator laptops with dedicated GPUs. I currently have an MSI Ge66 and it's a great laptop in many ways but it runs so hot, and the fan is so loud. I'd pay a premium (but not $6000!) to reduce that. Also, the unified memory is a big draw for both Blender and local AI.
I guess this is technically true, as the specs/prices seem to line up closely with a MacBook Pro.
Although, the thing is, for the AI tasks advertised, the MacBook Pros have faster memory, so token decode runs faster.
Then by using a Mac you also scuttle the issue of "My platform has a low rate of adoption" that Windows on ARM has had. That issue will get better over time but in the present it's still an issue.
As for the dedicated GPU gaming laptop market, you'd be surprised how it's evolved since the release date of your MSI Ge66. I mentioned the 2026 Zephyrus G16 specifically because it is a laptop with very few compromises, including heat and noise. If you don't specifically need a huge amount of GPU-addressable RAM, and you're just looking for good performance in games and graphics-intensive applications, it is a clearly better buy than these RTX Spark systems. As a bonus, being an X86 system you'll have a much easier getting Linux going on that one.
So, yes, it's good that there is another MacBook Pro alternative, but I think the issue remains that it's unclear who exactly the buyer persona is going to be. I think a lot of people in the venn diagram are going to just go with a MacBook Pro.
This part is more speculation on my part, but if Apple brings out the M7 Pro/Max chips on the rumored 2027 schedule, I think they will really blowpast RTX Spark at a time when it will take Nvidia years to have an equivalent answer.
It will also be curious to see if AMD can catch back up Medusa Halo launching next year. If that is anything close to RTX Spark it will sidestep the Windows on ARM issue entirely and look like a pretty attractive alternative. Hopefully AMD actually gets it put into a wide selection of laptops this time around.
https://www.techpowerup.com/340216/amd-medusa-halo-apu-leak-...
The strong case is pretty much only if you can't wait another 3-4 years for ram prices to come back down.
Memory makers are responding with a huge build-out. Building a fab shell and cleanroom takes years, which is why the crunch has lasted so long, but many of these projects are now well underway. New capacity is what ended past memory shortages. New factories going in:
SK hynix
M15X, Cheongju, Korea: first wafers early 2026 (reported), ramping through 2027 Yongin Y1, Korea: first cleanroom Feb 2027 (company target) Yongin Y2, Korea: groundbreaking planned July 2027, first cleanroom June 2029 Micron
ID1, Boise: first wafer output mid-2027 Tongluo, Taiwan: an existing PSMC cleanroom it bought for $1.8B, with meaningful shipments mid-2027 ID2, Boise: late 2028 Hiroshima, Japan: broke ground July 2026, with initial output late 2028 Clay, New York (up to 4 fabs, $100B): broke ground Jan 2026, with first output in 2030 Samsung
P5, Pyeongtaek: mass production 2028 (reported) Yongin national complex: site work began Oct 2026, with the first fab targeting Oct 2029 (reported; Samsung hasn't given a date) Nanya
Fab 5A, New Taipei: 10nm-class EUV DRAM, with wafer starts in 2H 2027 (reported) Tesla / SpaceX (Terafab)
Research fab at Giga Texas, Austin: broke ground April 2026. There's no official output date. Grimes County, Texas (logic, memory, packaging; Phase 1 over $16.8B): land clearing since Aug 2026. Texas filings say commercial operations in 2028, but SemiAnalysis estimates late 2029.
The first real supply relief is 2027, a second wave comes in 2028–29, and a lot of that new capacity is aimed at HBM and server memory, so consumer DDR5 and GDDR will likely ease last.
Sources: Micron FQ4 2026 call, the SK hynix newsroom, TrendForce, Texas JETI filings via ENR, and Tom's Hardware/SemiAnalysis.
> which is why the crunch has lasted so long,
It's been like a year-ish...
And maybe 2027 is a truly optimistic relief on some level,
> a second wave comes in 2028–29, and a lot of that new capacity is aimed at HBM and server memory, so consumer DDR5 and GDDR will likely ease last.
'Consumer DDR5' has a pretty big set of knock-on effects though.
Unless you are working at a 'tech' company, the norm is that even developer machines will be constrained on memory usage for a given workload[0][1]. IOW companies trying to keep procurement in check wind up looking at procurement cost vs lost productivity.
[0] - Modern infosec and corporate software, at least where I'm at, seems to be vaguely more efficient than electron apps, IOW I can reboot, open teams and my IDE, after 4GBish of my IDE and 1GB of a fresh Teams instance I'm already around 16 of 32GB.
[1] - I had to fight hard to get 32GB as a developer baseline at my org. They wanted 16GB. Ironically the JVM based devs get 64GB but still have slowdown issues on biuld...
> Unless you are working at a 'tech' company, the norm is that even developer machines will be constrained on memory usage for a given workload
Honestly I think most of us are just spoiled kids crying when our expensive toys are being taken away. If memory cost 10x more to manufacture than it does now, we’d just have 10x less ram in our computers and our software would be written to deal with that. We’ve done it before. My first computer had 4mb of ram and it ran windows 3.1 just fine. We still had working compilers. If ram were 10x cheaper before the supply shock, I think we’d be crying that companies won’t buy us 320gb ram in our laptops. The java and rust compilers would somehow be even less ram efficient. Firefox and chrome would still happily use it all to run adware across the same 50 tabs I want to keep open.
Theres good reason for LLMs to need that much ram. But very little else we do on our computers needs anywhere near as much ram as we use. Have faster computers made video games more fun in the last two decades? I don’t think so.
The supply crisis is annoying. But I’m also a little glad there’s a reason to push back on fat, lazy software.
I noticed yesterday that the original Ultima 7 required 2 MB of RAM and a 386 or 386SX [1]
You can buy a version from gog that runs on Windows 10 requiring 2 GB of RAM and an unspecified 1.8GHz CPU [2]
[1] https://www.mocagh.org/origin/u7completeaus-manual.pdf
[2] https://www.gog.com/en/game/ultima_7_complete
Realistically, GOG probably is trying to accommodate for the OS running the game. So it is more for the spec of the PC, not the RAM the game itself needs
Don’t spoil my hyperbole with facts
Well, so its not just bloated software that makes software bloated, but bloated facts, too. Users will see specs like that and go "well, I need to upgrade my machine from 2mb to 8gigs now, d'oh!" ...
> our software would be written to deal with that
I work at a place which offers a well-known operating system and also sells hardware which runs said OS. This is exactly what we have done, because the hardware releases this year have had to come with a quarter less memory. There is an internal effort to reduce memory consumption by a quarter at all levels of the platform, from the kernel, to the drivers and user-mode libraries, to the toolkits and user-mode applications. This has been remarkably successful.
I’m not surprised! The amount of wasted memory and compute in modern software is astounding.
If you’re a developer, try promoting Claude to profile and optimise a piece of some piece of software. I routinely see 20-40x improvements with a single prompt and a few hours of opus credits.
Thanks for your work by the way. At a large scale, it is much more efficient for some software developers to do a bit of belt tightening in their code than ask millions of customers to invest in bigger computers. Globally the savings are enormous.
Cheers; we try, but I wish we didn't have a memory crunch to get this effort going. I suspect at the end of all this we will have more memory-efficient code.
> try promoting Claude to profile
Oh, the irony. Claude is itself an Electron app and lags horribly.
At this point, all these agent apps—Claude, Copilot, ChatGPT—are just calling remote APIs. Why not train them on the native toolkits for each OS (Win32/WinUI3, Cocoa/SwiftUI, GTK, Qt, Jetpack Compose), and make the experience better for users?
> Why not train them on the native toolkits for each OS
Yes, this, 100x this.
Native-everything should just return to being the norm now.
End Cyclomatic Complexity!
I bet these factories exclusively build DDR6 and whatever GDDR is up to next, rather than DDR5, since that was already scheduled for 2027 anyways. Hopefully they don’t immediately shutter their DDR5 facilities rather than cut into their 90% operating margins :)
So do you think there will be a big crash and memory will get really cheap in 2030, or do you believe that AI demand is strong enough to sustain all this buildout?
It seems like this list also doesn't account for China and state sponsored memory industry (which will be more immune to a downturn)
Maybe I'm missing something but didn't micron exit the consumer DDR market for HBM? I don't see a rollback from that. When you say DDR will ease last, in what reality would memory makers go back to a market they left behind?
"You will be owned and you will be drugged to look like a happy." 20 somethin... Forum.
You could just code on a flight.. No need for llm. Id your brain is incapable of writing code without internet/llms you could write your specs/prompts for when you land.
You're not missing anything. Most devices these days are extremely limited without internet access.
Tailscale is the key ingredient.
Both the AMD Ryzen 395/495 and the Spark have terribly slow bandwidth, their performance is slower than a M2 max, akin to just an M4 Pro or RTX 4060.
>> Not sure there's a strong use case…
The author’s discussion of their personal use case starts on the seventh sentence in TFA. And frankly, it sounds like a pretty solid use case:
“Being able to run things locally and mess around with RL, quantisation and fine-tuning on a laptop would be sick. I already publish my own GGUF quants on Hugging Face, with over 160,000 downloads in the past month.”
This is similar to "Why buy powerful gaming laptop when you can build a gaming PC and a cheap laptop to remote into it". That was my setup years ago, and there are a lot of nuance things i hadn't taken into account.
For example, network is not always available and stable; File transferring is limited by connection speed, hardware passthrough is basically nonexistence; Dealing with power management (Unexpected power loss) and so on.
I bet they all can be solved(to some bearable degree), but at that point, just bite a bullet and get a powerful laptop.
The difference is that streaming zero latency 4k video is incredibly difficult and always results in serious compromises. For AI programming, the end output is very small, not latency sensitive very easy to stream over the internet.
I'm sure you can come up with some scenario where you are programming in the wilderness with no internet connection but the market for that has to be in the tens of people.
That when civilization falls, and we have to go to techno agrarian farming, like in Interstellar, the person with the RTX isn't the one that's going to be left behind, it's the person with the cloud account that owns nothing.
People want all in one portability and and performance so they'd choose this over a mini PC.
Being forced to login to use your own hardware is one issue for sure…
but separately everything about Microsoft’s login experience is pure pain.
Multiple broken redirects, broken links, buttons that loop, and more just to hit a CAPTCHA AI can solve anyway.
The only thing worse is for the poor soul developers who have had to login to their dev portal to setup SSO Microsoft for an app. It’s the worst I have ever seen in my life (even using Supabase that hand holds you through it).
Got stuck in a loop with my work account recently after setting up a passkey. It would cycle through something like 12 different pages, loading then redirecting before eventually ending at “You have been signed out”. Awful
The recovery image of my laptop is based on an old Win11 build where Microsoft login is now broken. So it falls back to local account after failing. Best bug!
I recently tried to recover to stock on the Zenbook A16 I returned and the WiFi wouldn't connect. Had to dig up an old USB Ethernet adapter to make it do the job.
Windows is such a bugs galore it's crazy how people use it as their daily drivers.
I just had a thing today where I wanted to play Forza Horizon 4 on my handheld.
When trying to launch the game I got a "Must sign in to Xbox/Microsoft to play". So I reluctantly complied and entered my password only to be met with "password login not available" after pressing enter.
Great... guess I just won't play then.
I got the HP version of this 128GB for 3.8k. I have yet to see a better deal for that ram.
(Expired but there was coupon https://slickdeals.net/f/20164014-hp-omnibook-x-14-nvidia-rt...)
How? I can see the 64GB version on HP website costs $5k right now: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-omnibook-ultra-laptop-n...
I agree with your skepticism.
3.8k is less than the preorder cost of the DGX Spark over a year ago (Oct 14th, 2025).
He got a slick deals deal. Great site.
Did it actually come in the mail?
I've bought some low-priced things on amazon, just to have them cancelled. Spooky since I figure someone got my name, address, phone number from amazon.
I have a DGX Spark (Ubuntu), and when Microsoft and NVIDIA announced the RTX Spark running Windows, I thought to myself: Why would I get that instead of the DGX Spark?
The OS makes a big difference for most developers, and the DGX Spark stack and experience is mature.
I thought so too, but there's a ton of people out there wading their way through trying to re-purpose their gaming rigs to run qwen3.8-flash-next on their gaming rig (at Q2..) via WSL
RTX Spark is $1,000 cheaper because it doesn't have the NIC and it also comes in a laptop if that's what you prefer.
Two different form factors. If you want/need a laptop, a mini PC/DGX Spark won't work as an alternative.
I have a DGX Spark, a USB-C monitor, a Logitech wireless Touch keyboard/trackpad, and a very fat USB-C battery, in the same backpack alongside a cheap MacBook Air. This portable AI/ML rig is getting a lot of work done in various local environments.
It’s not that heavy a tote - well, it’s heavy. But it’s an acceptable tote given the immense amount of local work that can be done with it, pretty much anywhere in the globe.
(Haven’t got the solar panel thing worked out yet, but yacht is my preferred data center anyway, if you know what I mean..)
i see a lot of complaining about the login part of Win11, and i dont like it either, but i have not seen anyone mention that you can build an autounattend.xml file (generator here: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/) that allows you to bypass all this. I have a USB Key with the file and the latest copy of the 11 Pro download, and when setting up a new machine, i run a fresh install. Then once booted, i run the developer config (https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsDeveloperConfig/) and it gets everything i need installed. No Microsoft Login, no Candy Crush, WSL installed and all the tools i need.
If installing 11 Pro by hand, you can also tell it you're going to do a domain login later, and it'll let you create a local only account.
Someone please tell the author thank you for working on that. I hope it gets into normal Arch distribution ASAP.
I recently moved to CachyOS and have been hoping to eventually save up for some kind of laptop (or more likely the cheaper N1 when it comes out, my income is very unstable) like this. I just assumed I would be able to put Linux on it.
I see this new chip/setup as being an obvious technological upgrade and more cost efficient, even though the memory bandwidth is slightly disappointing. But I see it it as a superior and more advanced architecture with the memory sharing and much more efficient integrated chip and more efficient ARM.
To me this is just clearly the logical way to build efficient laptops and PCs now. I do hope that we don't have to wait that long to get something with better memory bandwidth though.
I will admit that the description of prefill times is a little disappointing. Someone please tell the author thank you for working on that. I hope it gets into normal Arch distribution ASAP.
Is a Microsoft account required to use Windows on these RTX spark laptops?
Am I being too stubborn for not wanting a cloud account tied to my desktop operating system?
No, the vendor is being too presumptuous. This is clearly a case of them putting their needs above yours.
It is getting progressively more difficult to set up a new Windows laptop without a cloud account. Currently it's a pretty esotaric command line prompt if you know the keybinding to get a terminal open.
For Win10, I had to keep it disconnected from the network throughout the install process. Once you're connected, you have to do it all over again.
Win7 was the GOAT
Win2k was the best Windows, only gotten worse from there.
Win2K was the best for the time, but it's missing too many useful features for people to want to use it today. Win7 is the best today but is artificially deprecated.
Let ask Claude to RE the Win7 and backport new feature to it /s.
Well I already told it to make Win10 shut the hell up about updating to Win11, that worked at least
The worst it can get is having to reinstall windows with an image modified to run first setup with a local account. Though with a lot of manufacturers it's a good idea to do that anyway to also avoid all of the bloatware they preinstall.
My takeaway from these complaints is there were 5th graders in the 90s that were more skilled at installing Windows. If you can't find the way around it (10 sec search) the natural reaction is not "I'll install Linux and complicate my life further".
In fact if getting stalled by a single screen in the installer is a showstopper, then you're in for a world of hurt with Linux.
To be fair, TFA lists more reasons to avoid Windows:
> Mine include the privacy concessions during setup, the years spent waiting for Microsoft to let people put the taskbar on the side of the screen again, and the advertising.
Of course you don't have to agree on all of them, but please don't assume everyone acts only because they can't find a tutorial on the net!
Only 30 tok/s on Qwen 3.8 Flash Next? These days thanks to those specialized engines out there I can get ~2x that speed on a 24 GB video card with RAM offload. Thermal limits, I assume...
I wonder how its performance is on dense models.
memeory bandwidth is typically the limiting factor, not compute. Your card quite likely has 2x or more the bandwidth.
Yeah, its pretty low. I get about 60tps with a specialized engine on Strix Halo that runs UD-IQ4_XS with MTP
Which engine?
Which video card? Which specialized engine?
I fail to see the value, in this specific case.
There are already several OEMs shipping RTX Spark mini PCs with NVIDIA Linux distribution (NVIDIA DGX OS), support them, like Asus.
Instead the message keeps being the same, no value in selling pre-installed Linux devices.
> Doing the rationale thing to take advantage of the full capacity of my overpriced hardware
Why would you ever run anything else on equipment like that, which doesn't make any sense to me when enterprise grade hardware that is stationary would be more powerful anyway...because you aren't taking that on BART (I don't steal but seeing that thing in your lap, might bend that rule for myself since no real chance Bart PD would care anyway) or probably ever moving it from the place you use it now in ways that a mobile rack in your garage would be any less convenient for you.
Or if you felt strongly about consumer facing hardware, meaning really you pay through the nose to live in an efficiency in "SoMA" aka the Tenderloin, buy the mini-pc variant is just as easy to move but much less easy to break.
Hm, what's the learning here?
What challenge has been overcome?
I can see that hardware was bought, and that's cool hardware and all, but consumption is rather uninspiring.
I suppose it's the arm64 part? Or the review of some new hardware other people might be interested in?
As someone who was intrigued by these new machines but also has no interest in running Windows, I'm quite happy to learn it works. Though admittedly I was expecting to see DGX OS first.
i would do same if i have to use windows. I will literally pay anything to not use windows, thanks to microslop.
She literally posted a link to the patches she wrote to get it to boot linux. That seems like it's not nothing
But does it go into detail about those changes?
Because that sounds interesting! But I didn't see anything like that when I've (admittedly) skimmed through the review.
There's an entire GitHub repo, my man, with documentation and all. The article discusses this at some length.
Honestly, this whole line of commentary comes across very gatekeeper-ish. Isn't half of what makes it to the front page people showing off their cool shit?
Well, yeah, that was kinda the point. But also kinda not? The motivation you're reading into it is incorrect. (And rather un-HN for that matter. Both assuming bad faith and the whole.. uh.. reddit-ness.)
My point is that the linked blogpost is a poor representation of the work they did. And that is bad, because they've shared it themselves. So it makes sense to tell them that it might be a good idea to next time show more of their actual work and less of the stuff everyone else that just bought the machine could've done.
That is negative feedback, yes, but it is not negative to punch down on them, but, ideally, to lift them up. Anyway.
> it is not negative to punch down on them, but, ideally, to lift them u
I think some thought is needed on phrasing of your initial comment in this light. It very much comes across as punching down - it's not phrased as "this is cool, but it would be better with A and B", but rather it comes off very dismissively as "this post doesn't have any real value"
No, that's the point.
The spirit of this platform is different. You're wanting it to behave like other social media, where one has to soften everything and constantly glue on all the context one could possibly need just to feel emotionally safe.
Which is why those platforms do not get any useful conversation done, because it is incredibly exhausting.
Please stop trying to terraform this last bastion where capable people can have high-bandwidth interactions down to baseline Internet mediocrity.
You can use literally everything else to get the space that you want. We who don't can only use this.
There's nothing low-bandwidth about delivering feedback kindly. Being an asshole isn't some badge of tech-nerd honour.
Now you've just insulted me.
Does anybody know how Wayland performs on these?
Running Cosmic (which is a Wayland-only DE) on a DGX Spark. It just works.
Industry of Scam. Industry of Spy.
> When rumours started circulating about a laptop with over 100 GiB of RAM the GPU could access
That was like three years ago with the release of M3, do you not count MacBooks as laptops or something? Not that you could run Linux on it back then, but you don't even mention the existence of Apple silicon at all?
> you don't even mention the existence of Apple silicon at all?
Given the reasons she lists for not wanting Windows, I can't imagine her entering Apple's closed garden.
That's like saying Valve just released the first ever standalone VR headset because the standalones that came before had advertising and trackers (or worse). Or that TVs aren't produced anymore because they all come with similar software. Or cars.
Saying RTX Spark is the first laptop with 128 GB of unified memory just because you don't agree with the previous laptops with 128 GB of unified memory is just incorrect. You could easily make it true with qualifiers but there were none here!
Also did nobody ever release a 128GB Strix Halo laptop? I remember that being a thing around when the Framework Desktop came out? And feels like that'd have even better Linux support than Nvidia? What's the ideological objection to that?
Since all non-dedicated GPUs work this way I'd argue this was possible even longer ago. Now one has to question whether those integrated GPUs had any usable computing power. So it's not clear where to draw the line.
I can understand disregarding Apple hardware as they are not general computing devices since they support only a single, locked down OS.
> I can understand disregarding Apple hardware as they are not general computing devices since they support only a single, locked down OS.
Mac is absolutely a general computing device but macOS is the only software that fully supports it currently (Asahi Linux is still trying to get M3 Max and newer working)
You do know you can get a Microsoft account for free? It would have saved you a lot of trouble.
Yes, you can freely surrender your data and control to a hostile corporation. What isn't clear is why someone would want to. What you gain in freedom, control, and privacy is worth the pittance of time required to set up.
simply creating a Microsoft account would have been far quicker and easier ;-)
not really, it would simply be the first of many headaches that just get worse as time goes on. Windows is a festering blight, it costs you more and more in bullshit you deal with the longer you have it.
For example, I cannot currentl use the ms suite, like word or excel, because it asks me to log into an institutional account that I dont have, despite my account being the owner of the licenses for the suite running on my laptop. Make that make sense. All because i opened an institutional word document on it, i've tried fully reinstalling, no dice. i've tried nuking caches and registry entries, no dice. Window's basic functionality is indistinguishable from maleware.
Yeah, a copy of office I bought bricking myself, even while constantly keeping office autoupdate running was my last straw with them. Fortunately, LibreOffice seems to be mostly good enough now.
getting a local account is simple.
Windows Pro > Work or School Account > Join a Domain instead > Set password & recovery questions
The one component here that is not present on most machines straight from the manufacturer is the presence of the Pro version. The home version of windows requires the account with increasingly limited alternatives.
Simple™. Easy™.
As the author mentions in TFA, she's on the Arch staff as a package maintainer. I don't think there was a technical obstacle around the windows setup process.
https://archlinux.org/people/package-maintainers/#josie
I wonder. I sort of accidentally discovered that Rufus could edit my arm64 windows 11 install media without problem - adding a local account and bypassing the need for domain login (just as it does for amd64).
This isn't a new trick - just the regular approach to editing windows install media.
But that process still results in having Windows 11 installed on the computer. I don't think it's a stretch to assume someone on the Arch Linux staff has reasons for avoiding installing Windows which do not involve an inability to accomplish it.
also: if you don't set a password during OOBE, you won't be asked for security questions
Imagine have to lie to setup OS lol.
These things come with Windows 11 Home
Hey just as a heads-up Microsoft accounts are free to make https://signup.live.com/
But who would want that?
I don't want a cloud login telemetry of when I am using my computer, an account that can be disabled by a provider, and constant ads to backup to onedrive. I also moved to linux because of this. (was already a linux guy, but Windows is completely in my rear-view now.)
That is not acceptable in order to use a device you bought.
Also that means you're forced into a manditory arbitration clase and a class action waver.
The stuff you have to agree to is a very significant cost. You're not just associating a username with a password.
I can get dogshit for free too. Doesn't mean I want it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_as_in_Freedom
Microsoft turns on OneDrive backups by default without your knowledge or consent, sending your private files to MS servers, not only during setup but it can also happen during updates. Even when you try keep it disabled, they constantly pressure you into enabling it every time you login, and make it really easy to accidentally turn it on. Once your files are in OneDrive, MS can access them. Don't be surprised if it later turns out they're training their LLMs on people's private files.
I haven’t experienced any of this on my win 11 sim racing rig. I wonder why? I was thinking then i remembered - I ran a script I found that removed copilot, and a lot of other shit. Can’t remember the name it was on GitHub. I only use that computer to run iracing and LMU and it’s been updating fine.
Shouldn’t have to do that of course, but it can be done.
That is more work and less reliable than setting up Linux.
It's not. https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat
Not defending MS btw.
-~`I do not want one ever`~-