u/Porespellar

Mods please be kind. This was not “low effort”. It took me several minutes to find just the right waiting room gif to capture the sentiment of all us folks patiently waiting for our brothers and sisters in the east to hopefully drop some amazing new models on us.
I’m hoping for the 27b and 122b models, but I’ll be happy with whatever at this point. We need to see our little Capybara friend make an appearance here soon.

I was at an antique / thrift store near Helen Georgia a few days ago and spotted this old Caps patch. As a Caps fan, I blindly purchased it and didn’t realize exactly what I had until I began reading the text that went along with it when I got home. Yikes. Kind of wondering if I need to just go ahead and burn this thing.

Here’s the text that goes with the patch:

“The Washington Capitals® set four NHL® records in 1974-75, their first season in the league Unfortunately for the Caps, their records were for futility: at one point in the season they lost 17 straight
games, and lost 37 straight on the road. They allowed 446 goals against and won just eight games, the fewest ever in a regular-season schedule of 70 or more games. The Capitals used three coaches during the season, but nothing could overcome the team's lack of talent.

The Capitals were hindered partly by the expansion draft. As a new franci Washington could pick players from the established teams, but those teams allowed to protect their most important skaters. As a resuit, Washington's lineup was a collection of older players, minor-leaguers and fringe NHL players. The Kansas City Scouts", the NHL's other expansion team in 1974-75, buit its roster through the same system—and managed to win a respectable 15 games in its inaugural campaign. The Capitals did have a chance to acquire some young talent in the 1974 Entry Draft-they had the top pick in the first and second rounds-but the players they selected weren't able to make a substantial impact in the NHL. WASHINGTON CAPITALS

TOP DRAFT CHOICE PRODUCES ONE GOAL
Defenseman Greg Joly, Washington's first draft pick, appeared to have a lot of potential. He nad been named MVP of the Memorial Cup-Canadian Junior hockey's version of the Stanley Cup®-and his team, Regina, captured the championship. However, Joly strained his Achilles tendon in training camp and started the season poorly. He then injured his knee, missed 36 games, and struggled again when he returned. He finished the season with just one goal.

The team's second pick, winger Mike Marson, had a slightly better campaign.
He scored 16 goals, despite having arrived at training camp 27 pounds overweight.
Washington's top line at the start of the season was not a bad one, but it lacked a scoring touch. Veteran center Tommy Williams, who never had scored more than 23 goals in 14 pro seasons, notched 22 in the Capitals' first year. Left winger Denis Dupere was a good penalty killer, and he helped the power play despite his mediocre shot. In the first 28 games, he scored 14 goals. Right winger Dave Kryskow had been the club's first pick in the expansion draft, but he did not contribute much to the score sheet. Both Dupere and Kryskow finished the season with other teams.

SECOND LINE WOES
The second line was much less effective. Winger Gordie Brooks scored one goal before General Manager Milt Schmidt demoted him to the American Hockey League, while center Pete Laframboise scored just five times in 45 games.

Schmidt then traded Laframboise to Pittsburgh. Originally, Marson was the third member of the line, but Mike Bloom replaced him. This unit became known as the Blood Line, largely because of Bloom's fighting ability-he defeated Montreal heavyweight Pierre Bouchard in one bout. This was one of the few triumphs the Capitals enjoyed during the 1974-75 season.”

Why would they even sell this thing?

There is a lot of disdain for DGX Sparks here on the sub. And I get it. A lot of people say “It could have been great if it had been better memory bandwidth”, “SM-121 is a fake /second-class Blackwell chip” yadda, yadda. These criticisms are valid.

I bought one anyway because I’m pursuing a Masters in AI and I wanted it for training models, tool dev, testing, etc.
I was an early adopter, and like many, I was disappointed by the inference performance and software stack initially. Recently, my opinion and experience has changed.

NVIDIA has an “official” DGX Spark Development community forum that is thriving. The people in the DGX forum community are some of the kindest, smartest, most tenacious group of developers I’ve met. These dudes have one common goal: Squeeze every last drop of performance out of this hardware to prove to themselves and the world that they didn’t make a bad purchase by buying a Spark. I know that sounds snarky, but I don’t think it’s a bad goal.

The vibe on the forum is like “Ok bros, we all bought this thing, the peeps over at r/LocalLLama are all laughing at us right now, let’s show those sons-of-bitches what we can do” I mean, none of them would actually say that, because they are all really nice and helpful people, but that’s the vibe I get when I’m browsing through the posts. Everyone there has the same goal: optimize the hell out of DGX Spark to the highest level possible.. It’s wild seeing such a harmonious atmosphere. No one really argues, trolls, rage baits, none of that. Just everyone in the same boat, working together and encouraging each other, sharing benchmarks, code, vLLM recipes, etc. Reminds me of the vibe of this sub like 2 years ago before all the bot posts flooded the place.

If you don’t believe me, about the DGX dev community, go check it out for yourself:

https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/c/accelerated-computing/dgx-spark-gb10

Check out some of the cool projects they’ve spun up like Sparkrun (http://sparkrun.dev), PrismaQuant, Spark Lesderboard, eugr vLLM, and all the other amazing projects these guys are working on.

The one big advantage of the DGX hardware for these developers is the fact that the HW and OS is all exactly the same for everyone. You know your shit is going to work on every other Spark box that is out there and that is powerful for a unified community with one common goal.

So yes, DGX Spark could have been a lot better and was probably crippled by design, but that’s not stopping the DGX Spark Forum community, these MFers are going to use their sheer force of will and talent to make this thing a success just to spite all the naysayers. My two cents, agree or disagree?

Loving the trend of chonky dense models we’ve seeing right now. Keep then coming!