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Comment by BoggleOhYeah | Hacker News Reader

Kinda underwhelming. I was hoping to see that they improved their memory bandwidth to move toward competing with the M5 Max. But this is more akin to the Strix Halo.

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From what I'm reading it's probably the same chip that's used in the DGX Spark, the memory bandwidth at 300MB/s is equivalent to an M5 Pro, however you can't get an M5 Pro with 128GB of RAM. Apple pushes you to the biggest M5 Max chip, which at the 14 inch form factor, costs you $5099. You can get an ASUS GB10 machine with 2TB storage for $4000, so I guess the RTX Spark laptops will be more than that due to battery and screen, etc.

Perhaps the next generation of the spark will improve on the bandwidth and RAM size numbers. Yes it's a lot like a Strix Halo, but this has CUDA, which will be of interest to developers who want that.

I was looking for AMD AI Max+ 395 laptops recently, and the only ones I've found were 13 inch models, which seems odd from a heat dumping standpoint. I'm looking for 16 inches, I guess the 13 inch form factor would make it easy for commutes where you're taking it to dock to a large monitor at work or home, but no 14 inch screens?

I've tried the Z13 Flow and I actually like the form factor except for the folio keyboard. I especially like that, since it's a tablet, it vents hot air out the top instead of into your lap/table. But the whole driver situation was very weird and things would randomly stop working. That may have improved since I tried one ~1 year ago.

128 GB memory is also lame. I'm hankering for a windows equivalent of the mac studio that came with 512 GB.

The one that Apple discontinued not because of demand but memory pricing?

Isn't there a possibility they were killed because the M5 Ultra is coming why waste memory on a M3 series Ultra or any other high memory Mac Studio computer when the next generation is coming within six months?

Possible, to be sure. But given that you could still buy the cheesegrater Mac Pro (with RAM and disk at 2019 prices, and a 2019 CPU at 2019 prices) right up to the week that the the M2 Ultra Mac Pro was announced, that would be something new. Not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, to be sure, but still.

There's a photo here showing 600GBps memory bandwidth so maybe they have doubled it:

https://www.servethehome.com/nvida-introduces-rtx-spark-an-a...

600 is nvlink. Regular is 300.

M5 Max beats it, but for the price of an M5 Max, you are better off just getting a desktop with 2 3090s, which will be cheaper even at current prices.

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