Nvidia brings DGX to the desktop. The DGX Spark and DGX Station aim to make the powerful Grace Blackwell superchip accessible to developers at their desks. The DGX Spark is also an answer to AMD’s Strix Halo.
At GTC, Nvidia introduces the DGX Spark and DGX Station. For Nvidia, DGX stands for HPC capabilities in a complete package, provided by Nvidia itself. With some sense of exaggeration, CEO Jensen Huang calls the devices ‘personal AI supercomputers’. The devices are certainly powerful and exclusively target AI development.
The Nvidia DGX Spark is the smaller of the two systems. The small computer measures 15 cm x 15 cm x 5.05 cm and contains an Nvidia GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip. This is an APU that combines a Blackwell GPU with an ARM-based Grace CPU. Both chiplets share 128 GB of LPDDR5x memory. Nvidia bonds CPU, GPU, and memory together via its own NVLink-C2c interconnect. The CPU has twenty cores: ten ARM Cortex-X925 and ten Cortex-A725 cores.
Nvidia Spark vs. AMD Strix Halo
The combination is powerful and extremely suitable for AI workloads. AMD knows this too. With the Ryzen AI Max (Strix Halo) chips, the competitor combines an x86 CPU with its own GPU and also 128 GB of shared memory. Strix Halo fits in mini desktops and laptops, and the DGX Spark is also compact (image at top). The DGX Spark shows that Nvidia also wants to win souls in this market segment.
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Nvidia’s offering has both advantages and disadvantages. The GB10 superchip offers a powerful GPU supported by the extensive Nvidia AI software stack. This is considered the standard for AI development today. On the other hand, AMD’s solution is x86 and Windows compatible, while Nvidia’s is not. The DGX Spark runs on the Linux-based DGX OS. Strix Halo will appear in fairly classic laptops and workstations, making AMD’s version much more accessible.
Big Brother
Nvidia is also launching the DGX Station. This is the big brother of the DGX Spark. This device brings data center power to the desktop. The system is built around the Nvidia GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Desktop Superchip.
This chip plays in a different category. On the CPU side, we find 72 Neoverse V2 cores, assisted by 784 GB of RAM. Of this, 288 GB is provided for the GPU, and 496 GB for the CPU.
It’s not the first time Nvidia has launched a DGX Station, but this specimen is being marketed as a desktop solution for the first time.
Price and availability
The DGX desktops are both a device and a blueprint for a desktop. Manufacturers such as Dell, HP, and Lenovo will build both computers. DGX Station is very close to a server and is therefore also built by server specialists like Supermicro.
When the devices roll off another manufacturer’s production line, they get a different name. For example, Dell announces the Dell Pro Max with GB10: its own version of the Spark. Dell’s version of the DGX Station will be called Dell Pro Max with GB300 (everything at Dell is called Pro, Max and/or Premium these days).
The DGX Station will be available later this year. We don’t know the prices for the large desktop yet. The target price for the Spark, which will also be available this year, is around 3,000 dollars.
If you want Blackwell in your desktop, you can also get it with regular RTX 50 cards, or the RTX Pro Blackwell GPUs also launched at GTC.