Nvidia's latest AI PC boxes sound great – for data scientists with $3k to spare

Summary

Analysis Disrupt? It's an awful hackneyed term that some analysts, consultants and technologists like to use. It is currently being applied to stock market darling Nvidia which lifted the covers off a broad range of tech at its GTC event last week, stuff that could "disrupt" all aspects of enterprise infrastructure. As well as a plethora of reassuringly expensive datacenter infrastructure systems, including supercomputer-level performance in a single rack, the GPU maker announced DGX Station and DGX Spark, a workstations and personal computer respectively. DGX Spark (formerly Project Digits) is a diminutive desktop box containing a GB10 Grace Blackwell system-on-chip (SoC) and 128 GB of unified system memory, which Nvidia claims is capable of 1,000 trillion operations per second (TOPS) in AI number wrangling – considerably more than your average AI PC. DGX Station is closer in size to a professional workstation, and is based on Nvidia's more powerful GB300 Blackwell Ultra desktop superchip with 784 GB of unified memory to speed large-scale training and inferencing workloads. Both systems are considerably smaller than the GPU giant's more familiar datacenter platforms, but still offer a decent whack of compute power for AI developers, researchers, data scientists, and possibly even students – although the tiny DGX Spark alone is said to cost $3,000. Analysts at Omdia believe Nvidia is now working to enmesh itself in other areas of the enterprise after effectively cornering the market in AI training infrastructure: "In the hardware space they will disrupt PCs (desktop and laptop), workstations and storage on top of the revolution they have started in servers and networking." This seems like something of a tall order as AI PCs have hardly set the world alight since the concept was unleashed a year ago. As The Register reported late last year, PC sales were showing little sign of rebounding, despite the efforts of vendors to draw buyer attention with AI-capable systems,...