During Computex Nvidia announced, yet another, PC replacement platform called the RTX Spark. While the claims suggest that the new platform has killed the desktop PC, the truth of the matter is. Its just another fancy Macintosh clone stuffed full of Nvidia technology. Of course, this isn’t the first time that Nvidia has attacked the PC industry and every time the product has failed due to mismatched performance promises and poor adoption.
With the RTX Spark you will find that all of that major PC and Laptop vendors have RTX Spark machines available including the flagship manufacture, Microsoft.
So, what is the RTX Spark. There are several ways you can look at it and the only way it really works is that the low powered ARM based CPU is just a router, all major OS and application processing has been offloaded to the GPU and the entire system is used a shared memory pool. Shared memory helps to bring down the cost but means that GPU performance will be slow and CPU performance will suffer. Neither of these really matter to 80% of laptop users since they use the machines for typical office tasks and surfing the web. Gamers will enjoy the RTX 5070 mobile GPU and AI enthusiasts will enjoy having a massive memory pool for loading LLMs but, will also get their steps in while waiting for tokens to generate.
PC Mods that Don’t Matter
The second part of the Podcast is dedicated to a single poster floating around Facebook talking about PC parts that don’t matter. For the PC hardware enthusiast, part of the fun of building a new machine is picking the best parts and enjoying the kudos of a job well done.
As a resident PC expert, I/we get questions all the time about picking the right PC parts only to have the person go to PC Parts Picker and select the lowest cost item. It stings a little bit that your expert opinions are no longer honored but, fact of the matter is… Sometimes it really doesn’t matter.
That is what the following poster is trying to tell us.
What I find amusing is that every one of these components has been selected because they are currently popular with the “budding” PC builder and are heavily debated on the social platforms.
Episode 186 featured music:
Little People - Start Shootin' (http://www.littlepeoplemusic.com/)
