Nvidia DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem

Summary

NVIDIA DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem 14th October 2025 NVIDIA sent me a preview unit of their new DGX Spark desktop “AI supercomputer”. I’ve never had hardware to review before! You can consider this my first ever sponsored post if you like, but they did not pay me any cash and aside from an embargo date they did not request (nor would I grant) any editorial input into what I write about the device. The device retails for around $4,000. They officially go on sale tomorrow. First impressions are that this is a snazzy little computer. It’s similar in size to a Mac mini, but with an exciting textured surface that feels refreshingly different and a little bit science fiction. There is a very powerful machine tucked into that little box. Here are the specs, which I had Claude Code figure out for me by poking around on the device itself: Hardware Specifications Architecture: aarch64 (ARM64) CPU: 20 cores 10x Cortex-X925 (performance cores) 10x Cortex-A725 (efficiency cores) RAM: 119 GB total (112 GB available)—I’m not sure why Claude reported it differently here, the machine is listed as 128GB Storage: 3.7 TB (6% used, 3.3 TB available) GPU Specifications Model: NVIDIA GB10 (Blackwell architecture) Compute Capability: sm_121 (12.1) Memory: 119.68 GB Multi-processor Count: 48 streaming multiprocessors Architecture: Blackwell Short version: this is an ARM64 device with 128GB of memory that’s available to both the GPU and the 20 CPU cores at the same time, strapped onto a 4TB NVMe SSD. The Spark is firmly targeted at “AI researchers”. It’s designed for both training and running models. The tricky bit: CUDA on ARM64 Until now almost all of my own model running experiments have taken place on a Mac. This has gotten far less painful over the past year and a half thanks to the amazing work of the MLX team and community, but it’s still left me deeply frustrated at my lack of access to the NVIDIA CUDA ecosystem. I’ve lost count of the number of libraries ...