NVIDIA’s new DGX Spark is a mini PC that measures 150 x 150 x 50.5mm (5.9″ x 5.9″ x 2″). But NVIDIA isn’t positioning it as a general-purpose computer. Instead, it’s an “AI Supercomputer” in a compact package.
At the heart of the little PC is an NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip that NVIDIA says delivers up to 1000 TOPS performance at FP4 precision. First announced earlier this year, the DGX Spark is expected to sell for $3,000 and NVIDIA says it’s taking reservations starting today.
The little computer features a 20-core processor with 10 ARM Cortex-X925 CPU cores and 10 Cortex-A725 cores and an NVIDIA Blackwell GPU with 5th-gen Tensor Cores, 43th-gen RT cores, and 128GB of unified LPDDR5x system memory with a 256-bit memory interface and 273 Gb/s memory bandwidth.
The result is a computer that can run AI models with up to 200 billion parameters locally without offloading any work to the cloud. You can also link two DGX Spark systems together with a networking cable to handle models with up to 405 billion parameters.
That unified memory system is an important part of the setup – NVIDIA says its NVLink-C2c interconnect technology can “deliver a CPU+GPU-coherent memory model with 5x the bandwidth of fifth-generation PCIe” for quicker data access between a GPU and CPU.
AMD has its own version of this, which is why all computers with AMD Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” ship with onboard LPDDR5x memory rather than user-upgradeable RAM.
NVIDIA’s DGX Spark also features an M.2 slot for PCIe NVMe storage (it comes with 1TB or 4TB options), support for WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3 and a set of ports that includes:
- 4 x USB4 (40 Gbps)
- 1 x 10 GbE LAN (ConnectX-7 Smart NIC)
- 1 x HDMI 2.1
The total system power consumption is 170 watts, and the DGX Spark runs NVIDIA’s Linux-based DGX OS software.
While announcing the impending availability of this tiny AI workstation, NVIDIA also introduced an upcoming DXG Station that will be a larger system that looks more like a desktop tower PC than the rack-mounted systems you’d normally expect to see. That model has an NVIDIA GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Desktop Superchip with 72 Neoverse V2 CPU cores, up to 784GB of coherent memory (288GB GPU + 496GB LPDDR5x for the CPU), and ConnectX-8 SuperNIC networking with speeds up to 800Gb/s.
According to NVIDIA, the DGX Station will be available later this year, but it won’t necessarily be made by NVIDIA. Instead we’ll see models from companies like Asus, BOXX, Dell, HP, Lambda, and SuperMicro.
While there’s no mention of third-party versions of the smaller DGX Spark, it looks like Asus plans to deliver one called the Asus Ascent GX10. A press release was published (and deleted) a little ahead of NVIDIA’s announcement, but it was spotted by the folks at Tom’s Hardware and copies are available at the Internet Archive and some other sites. And Dell has introduced its own model called the Dell Pro Max with GB10. Dell says it “will be available later this year.”
