It's not weird at all, they know people will buy these laptops, put linux on them and stash them in data-centers, so they are trying to prevent this.
Not those laptops.
I was genuinely excited about this device until I heard the specs. Still under 300GB/s memory bandwidth when a gpu like rtx3090 from 6 years ago had 900+
This is really bread crumbing local inference users.
We should be measuring our memory bandwidth in TB by now. The only company that seems to be serious about this is Apple. (the m5 ultra studio etc).
that seems really hard to believe? If you wanted this running Linux in a data center you'd have just been buying the cheaper and yet also more powerful DGX Sparks.
The only value proposition of RTX Spark at all is the laptop form factor
Yes, exactly this.
Nvidia does something to prevent abuse so that regular people who want the laptops can buy one. Nvidia gets knocked on.
If this were cost-effective, why wouldn't they just buy DGX Sparks, with similar performance at similar price points and a more convenient form factor?
Or RTX Spark and run their workloads under WSL, which as the article notes, has minimal overhead relative to running Linux directly?
This sounds more like a bug than a feature, especially given that Linux on battery runs at full clock speed and downclocks when plugged in, and Windows does the opposite, suggesting they could at least mitigate the problem with no changes to their software stack by inverting a conditional in the firmware and adding a Linux kernel parameter to control memory allocation as apparently already exists for Windows.