Nvidia's new 'robot brain' goes on sale for $3,499

My assumotion would be it will siffer the same delays as DGX Spark as it is a very similar chipset, so maybe December?

they are becoming available on arrow in limited quantities. I just ordered mine arriving this week

Can self-driving cars be framed as robots?

An electric car would have no issue sustaining this level of power; a gas-powered car doubly-so.

I tried to look up human wattage as a comparison and I'm very surprised that it lands around the same ballpark. Around 145W as a daily average and around 440W as a an approximate hourly average during exercise.

I thought current gen robots would be an order of magnitude less efficient. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

A robot working at an assembly line can be powered with a cable.

> too much power to be practical on a robot

robot could be useful even when permanently plugged to the grid.

The efficacy to weight ratio of meat vs. rocks and metal is freakin' absurd. We don't know how to build a robot that's as strong and damage-resistant as a human body and weighs only as much as one. Similarly we don't know how to build something as energy-efficient as a human brain that thinks anywhere near as well. Artificial superintelligence may well be a thing in the coming decades, but it will be profoundly energy-greedy; I fear the first thing it will resolve to do is secure fuel for itself by stealing our energy supplies like out of Superman III.

Any sort of continuous video processing, especially low-latency.

Imagine you were tracking items on video at a self-service checkout. Sure, you could compress the video down to 15 Mbps or so and send it to the cloud. But now, a store with 20 self-checkouts needs 300 Mbps of upload bandwidth. That's one more problem making it harder for Wal-Mart to buy and roll out your product.

Also, if you know you need an NVIDIA L4 dedicated to you 24/7 for a year, a g6.xlarge will cost $7,000/year on-demand or $4,300/year reserved [1] while you can buy the card for $2,500.

Of course for many other use cases the cloud is a fine choice. If you only need a fraction of a GPU, or you only need a monster GPU a tiny fraction of the time, or you need an enormous LLM that demands water cooling and tolerates latency easily, the cloud can be a fine choice.

[1] https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/g6.xlarge?currency=USD&...

Anything latency sensitive. Anything bandwidth constrained.

Simple example, Security cameras that only use bandwidth when they've detected something. The cost of live streaming 20 cameras over 5g is very high. The cost of sending text messages with still images when you see a person is reasonable.

Why the hell would a dishwasher need to be connected, or smart for that matter?

I just want clean dishes/clothes, not to be upsold into some stupid shit that fails when it can’t ping google.com or gets bricked when the company closes.

I would pay premium for certified mindless products.

Anecdotally, I don't have any direct physical evidence or written evidence to support this. But I talked to someone in the industry over a decade ago when "run it on a GPU" was just heating up. It's drones. Not DJI ones, military ones with surveillance gear and weapons.

Mining, remote construction, remote power station inspection, battlefields. there are many many places where a stable network connection can't be taken for granted.

I want local processing for my local data. That includes my photos, documents and surveillance camera feeds.

If I had to guess there is significant interest in this product from a certain Eastern European nation. I don’t think they are intending to use it for “robotics” though.

it depends if the plates were expensive.

The models that run on robots do things like "where is the road" or "is this package damaged"; people will run LLMs on this thing, but that's not it's primary bread-and-butter

There's already this hilarious bot. It's able to use people's outfits to woo them, or insult them. It's pretty good!

https://www.instagram.com/rizzbot_official/

> CEO Jensen Huang has said robotics is the company’s largest growth opportunity outside of artificial intelligence

Does "robotics outside of AI" imply they want to get into making actual robots (beyond the GPU "brains")?

AMD should jump on this immediately.

Edge compute has not yet been won. There is no ecosystem for CUDA for it yet.

Someone else but Nvidia please pay attention to this market.

Robots can't deal with the latency of calls back to the data center. Vision, navigation, 6DOF, articulation all must happen in real time.

This will absolutely be a huge market in time. Robots, autonomous cars, any sort of real time, on-prem, hardware type application.

It should be noted that Neoverse V3AE and Neoverse V3 are the automotive/server versions of the Cortex-X4 core, which is well known from many smartphones (and which is similar in performance to the Skymont E-cores of the Intel Lunar Lake, Arrow Lake S and Arrow Lake H CPUs).

While the Cortex-X925, the successor of Cortex-X4, has better absolute performance, it has much worse performance per die area. Therefore, for a CPU where the best multi-threaded performance is desired, Neoverse V3AE/Neoverse V3/Cortex-X4 remains the best CPU core designed by the Arm company.

This year's Arm core announcements have been delayed and it is not clear how the future Cortex-A930 and Cortex-X930 will compare with the currently existing Cortex-X4, Cortex-A725 and Cortex-X925.

Its not even close dude, the nvidia stuff is like 2000 TOPS vs the 50 you get from the ai 395+

And now everyone's $2000 Orins will be stuck forever on Ubuntu 24.04 just like the Xaviers were abandoned on 20.04 and the TX1/2 on 18.04.

Nothing like explaining to your ML engineers that they can only use Python 3.6 on an EOL operating system because you deployed a bunch of hardware shortly before the vendor released a new shiny thing and abruptly lost interest in supporting everything that came before.

And yes, TX2 was launched in 2017, but Nvidia continued shipping them until the end of 2024, so it's absurd they never got updated software: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/jetson-tx2-lifecycle-e...

Thor is a pretty big jump in power and the current prices are a bargain compared to what else is out there if you need the capabilities. I wish there was a competitive alternative, because Nvidia is horrible to work with.

128 GB for $3,499 doesn't sound bad at all.

It has a unified memory architecture, so the 128G is shared directly between CPU and GPU. Though it's slower than dGPU VRAM.

Yes, but it is substantially cheaper and usually faster to buy a Jetson Orin chip or build an x86 homelab.

Memory bandwidth is less than 300 GB/sec, looking at the data sheet. So it won't really be any faster at local inference than a Mac Pro or a decent x86 box.

It appears to be an embedded DGX Spark, at the end of the day.

The CPU cores are very different (big Cortex-X925 + small Cortex-A725 vs. medium-size Cortex-X4 = Neoverse V3AE).

The CPU of DGX Spark has better single-threaded performance, while that of Thor has better multi-threaded performance per die area and per power consumption.

Or "VR Chat + Mostly human art and control but digital representation" ends up being more fun, engaging, cheap and/or humanizing. Wonder that the best accurate full-body tracking + VR headset one could put together today for that? Feels like it could be cheaper than just the "hardware brain" part of that.

You don’t need Thor nor ROS for this, but it can certainly help.

It has ARM CPU cores and an Nvidia GPU so it can do whatever you want but it's optimized for AI video analysis. Great for factory robots or self-driving cars.

It is, some small differences. Also rumoured this will become a laptop chipset in future, although probably at lower power.

Serious question, what comparable hardware can you buy for 10% of the cost?

> the _first_ thing I'd do is ditch the silly leather jacket and dress like an adult

Given what he has accomplished, he has more than earned the right to wear a leather jacket if he wants to. People didn't complain about Steve Jobs wearing a turtleneck for the same reason. When you have accomplished as much as these guys, then you can dish out fashion advice and maybe someone will listen.

First thing I'd do is keep making more expensive shovels until gold miners stop buying them.