As far as I know, you can use other OSes once the Spark's firmware is updated with LVFS.

You'll need a custom-built distro image, but that goes for like 90% of ARM hardware on Linux.

For inference, the prefill on the DGX Spark is like 5x the speed. Decode about the same (both bandwidth limited to about the same memory speed, unfortunately).

Difference is on the Spark you can use and learn CUDA, vLLM, SGlang etc which is the industry standard.

I bought mine (ASUS version) back in December with the intent to learn that stack of stuff. I've been on and off with it but it seems to have paid off, looks like I might be getting work in the inference serving space.

Microcenter has them marked at $4500 right now (that's with the 4TB SSD) [1]. I suspect it comes down to what you're using it for; if you're looking for a general purpose computer that's also solid at AI, the AMD machine is better. But if you want the best possible AI machine at below $5k... actually you should probably just buy an RTX 3090 or 5090. But if the 128gb of memory is critical, then yeah DGX Spark is it.

[1] https://www.microcenter.com/product/699008/nvidia-dgx-spark

Ah ya then that's a bit of a gap.

For anyone considering these devices, the only reason I would recommend against them is if you plan on getting multiple to link together - the DGX Spark has a much, much faster interconnect bandwidth ceiling than the AMD devices do.

Otherwise, they're great!

I can't wait for the memory price crisis to end so these things drop in price so I can get a second one.

I'm looking at Amazon and I see $4k GB10 devices right now (not an affiliate link) https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Supercomputer-Superchip-Supports...

That's the rub... this platform was supposed to be around $1200-1400 maxed out, but now it's $4k, which is insane.