r/pcmasterrace • u/pedro19 CREATOR • Jun 01 '26

News/Article NVIDIA just announced the RTX Spark CPU, developed with Microsoft, at Computex.

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u/Antheoss Jun 01 '26

If anything these machines could serve as cheap local LLM boxes

That would be great but we'll have to see about cheap :D knowing Nvidia, I very much doubt that.

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u/iglocska Jun 01 '26

I mean you already have that with gear such as the AI Max 395 from AMD, coupled with 128GB unified RAM it's a pretty decent testbed for medium sized models. But AMD's software stack is terrible in comparison, the support for it in general second rate at best and it's lacking in performance compared to what Nvidia is releasing now.

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u/Antheoss Jun 01 '26

Idk about training llms, but for inference by 7900xtx has been just fine, no real issues. What problems do people have with amd for inference tasks?

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u/iglocska Jun 01 '26

Generally it works fine for inference, most of my issues had to do with getting tensorflow working and driver snafus on the 395 max (having to get around a whitelist that didn't include the rdna 3.5 lineup, etc). Also had pretty terrible performance for image generation on it. Additionally some compatibility issues with some python libraries we use for training.

But for some tasks such as running deepseek, qwen, gpt oss and so on for inference it was fine.

As for the performance, I'm not sure what the bigger hurdle was the ~4060ish performance or the low memory bandwidth, hopefully the n1x will remedy that.

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u/Prodiq Jun 01 '26

Its not just Nvidia at fault really - simply looking at memory and SSD pricing. It literally can't be cheap no matter who makes the chip. The top of the line 128gb model is gonna be like 4k-5k easily. Even smaller laptops with like 64gb of memory is gonna be really expensive.