But the nicest addition Dell made in my opinion is the retro 90's UNIX workstation-style wallpaper: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/grace-blackwell/
https://www.fsi-embedded.jp/contents/uploads/2018/11/DELLEMC...
Then there is the networking. While Strix Halo systems come with two USB4 40Gbit/s ports, it's difficult to
a) connect more than 3 machines with two ports each
b) get more than 23GBit/s or so per connection, if you're lucky. Latency will also be in the 0.2ms range, which leaves room for improvement.
Something like Apple's RDMA via Thunderbolt would be great to have on Strix Halo…
Prompt processing is literally 3x to 4x higher on GPT-OSS-120B once you are a little bit into your context window, and it is similarly much faster for image generation or any other AI task.
Plus the Nvidia ecosystem, as others have mentioned.
One discussion with benchmarks: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1oonomc/comment...
If all you care about is token generation with a tiny context window, then they are very close, but that’s basically the only time. I studied this problem extensively before deciding what to buy, and I wish Strix Halo had been the better option.
It's not really intended to be a great value box for running LLMs at home. Jeff Geerling talks about this in the article.
If I want to do hobby / amateur AI research or do stuff with fine tuning models etc, learn the tooling. I'm better off with the DG10 than AMD or Apple's systems.
The Strix Halo machines look nice. I'd like one of those too. Especially if/when they ever get around to getting it into a compelling laptop.
But I ordered the ASUS Ascent DG10 machine (since it was more easily available for me than the other versions of these) because I want to play around with fine tuning open weight models, learning tooling, etc.
That and I like the idea of having a (non-Apple) Aarch64 linux workstation at home.
Now if the courier would just get their shit together and actually deliver the thing...
I've used it to fine tune 20+ models in the last couple of weeks. Neither a Mac or Strix Halo even try to compete.
And the 2x 200 GBit/s QSFP... why would you stack a bunch of these? Does anybody actually use them in day-to-day work/research?
I liked the idea until the final specs came out.
I'm really curious to see how things shift when the M5 Ultra with "tensor" matmul functionality in the GPU cores rolls out. This should be a multiples speed up of that platform.
