(Credit: Nvidia)
Nvidia has steered clear of creating its own PCs. But at CES, the company came a little closer by showing off a mini desktop system.
Dubbed "Project DIGITS," the product is set to arrive as a small, square-shaped package no different from other mini PCs. It’ll also run Nvidia’s DGX OS, the company’s custom version of Ubuntu Linux. “In essence, it’s a personal supercomputer for your desk,” Nvidia product marketing director Allen Bourgoyne told reporters during a briefing.
But Project DIGITS isn’t meant to be a standalone product. Rather, it’s designed to work as a peripheral that can connect to a customer’s main desktop PC, running heavy AI-focused workloads on the side.
(Credit: Nvidia)Nvidia designed the mini computer to appeal to AI developers, data scientists, and students looking to get their hands on the company’s Blackwell GPU, which can cost between $30,000 to $40,000 per unit. In contrast, DIGITS will be sold starting at $3,000 through Nvidia and its partners this May.
Project DIGITS appears to be a scaled-down version of Blackwell, offering 1 petaflop of AI performance, instead of 10 or 20 petaflops. Specifically, the product carries the GB10 Blackwell Supership along with 128GB of unified system memory, enabling it to support AI models up to 200 billion parameters in size — similar to OpenAI’s GPT-3.
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DIGITS also promises to run without any extra cooling or power needs. Nvidia says the hardware can connect to a regular electrical socket, giving owners a way to run large AI models, without always relying on third-party servers hosted over the internet. Instead, DIGITS can be used as a testing bed to fine-tune or prototype AI models or programs before scaling them out to a data center. The hardware itself can support up to 4TB of NVMe storage.
“In addition, using Nvidia ConnectX networking, two Project DIGITS AI supercomputers can be linked to run up to 405-billion-parameter models,” the company adds.
Interested customers can go to Nvidia.com to sign up for notifications on when Project DIGITS officially launches.
The announcement arrives weeks after Nvidia launched a budget-focused mini computer in the $249 Jetson Orin Nano Super, which is also designed mainly to run AI-based applications.