This relatively affordable AI workstation isn’t about going fast; it’s about doing everything well enough

hands on Nvidia bills its long-anticipated DGX Spark as the "world's smallest AI supercomputer," and, at $3,000 to $4,000 (depending on config and OEM), you might be expecting the Arm-based mini-PC to outperform its less-expensive siblings.

But the machine is far from the fastest GPU in Nvidia's lineup. It's not going to beat out an RTX 5090 in large language model (LLM) inference, fine tuning, or even image generation — never mind gaming. What the DGX Spark, and the slew of GB10-based systems hitting the market tomorrow, can do is run models the 5090 or any other consumer graphics card on the market today simply can't.

When it comes to local AI development, all the FLOPS and memory bandwidth in the world won't do you much good if you don't have enough VRAM to get the job done. Anyone who has tried machine ...