Nvidia has always found a pretext and shied away from building its own PCs, but in the new CE, the company came a little closer to this class of devices, showing off a mini desktop system.
With the inventive new name “Project DIGITS”, the product is set to arrive as a small, square-shaped device that looks indistinguishable from other mini computers. It will also run Nvidia’s DGX OS, the company’s customized version of Ubuntu Linux. “In essence, it’s a personal supercomputer for your office,” Nvidia product marketing director Allen Bourgoyne told reporters during a briefing.
But Project DIGITS is not intended to be a standalone product. Rather, it is designed to act as a peripheral accessory/unit that can be attached to a customer’s main desktop computer, running heavy AI-focused workloads.
Nvidia’s development team’s main concern was to create a mini PC that would appeal to AI developers, cloud programmers, and students looking to get their hands on the company’s Blackwell GPU, which can cost anywhere from $30,000 to $40,000 per unit. Instead, DIGITS will be sold starting at $3,000 through Nvidia and its partners this May.
Project DIGITS appears to be a scaled-down version of Blackwell, offering 1 petaflop of AI performance, rather than 10 or 20 petaflops. Specifically, the product carries the GB10 Blackwell Supership along with 128GB of unified system memory, allowing it to support AI models up to 200 billion parameters in size — similar to OpenAI’s GPT-3.
For some reason, DIGITS will run without additional cooling or power. Nvidia says the hardware can be plugged into a regular outlet, giving owners a way to run large AI models without always relying on third-party servers hosted over the internet. Instead, DIGITS can be used as a testing platform for fine-tuning or prototyping AI models or programs before scaling them up in a data center. The hardware itself can support up to 4TB of NVMe storage.
“Furthermore, using Nvidia ConnectX networking, two Project DIGITS AI supercomputers can be connected to models of up to 405 billion parameters,” the company adds.
Interested customers can go to Nvidia.com to sign up for notifications about the official release of Project DIGITS.
Source: myphone.gr
