On the networking side. M4 max does have thunderbolt 5, 80gbps advertised. Would ip over TB not allow for significantly faster interconnects when clustering Macs?

Yes, people use Thundebolt networking to build Mac AI clusters. The Spark has 200G Ethernet that is even faster though.

Made the correction to 80Gb/sec thank you.

W.r.t ip, the fastest I’m aware of is 25Gb/s via TB5 adapters like from Sonnet.

You should not be using an adapter to get IP over Thunderbolt. Just connect a Thunderbolt5 cable to both machines.

For point to point sure, but if you want to connect multiple machines in an actual fabric you’ll need some kind of network interop.

The Asus clustering speed is not limited to p2p.

Fair enough. On the other hand you have more thunderbolts to make up a clique mesh of seven point to point Macs.

AMD 395+ is more bang for the buck IMO.

GMKtec EVO-X2 vs GX10 vs MacBook Pro M4 Max

  Price:  $2,199.99 / $3,000 / $5,000
  CPU:  Ryzen AI Max 395+ (Strix Halo, 16C/32T) / NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB200 Superchip (20-core ARM v9.2) / Apple M4 Max (12C)
  GPU:  Radeon 890M (RDNA3 iGPU) / Integrated Blackwell GPU (up to 1 PFLOP FP4) / 40-core integrated GPU
  Memory:  128GB LPDDR5X / 128GB LPDDR5X unified / 128GB unified
  Memory bandwidth:  ???GB/s / ~500GB/s / ~546GB/s
  SSD:  1TB PCIe 4.0 / 4TB PCIe 5.0 / 1TB NVMe
  GPU advantage:  Similar (EVO-X2 trades blows with GB10 depending on model and framework)
  Network:  2.5GbE / 10GbE / 10GbE (via TB)
  Direct cluster:  40Gb (USB4/TB4) / 200Gb / 80Gb
  Portable:  Semi (compact desktop) / No / Yes
  Free Mac included:  No / No / Yes
  Free monitor:  No / No / Yes
  Linux out of the box:  Yes / Yes / No
  CUDA dev environment:  No (ROCm) / Yes / No

The DGX Spark, Ascent GX10, and related machines have no relation to NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB200. The chip they are based on is called GB10, and is architecturally very different from NVIDIA's datacenter solutions, in addition to being vastly smaller and less powerful. They don't have anything resembling the Grace CPU NVIDIA used in Grace Hopper and Grace Blackwell datacenter products. The CPU portion of GB10 is a Mediatek phone chip's CPU complex that metastasized, not NVIDIA's datacenter CPU cut down.

Where does MediaTek come into the picture? Don't they take some ARM Cortex IP directly from ARM just like MediaTek and many others?

Mediatek is in the picture because NVIDIA outsourced everything in GB10 but the GPU to Mediatek. GB10 is two chiplets, and the larger one is from Mediatek. Yes, Mediatek uses off the shelf ARM CPU core IP, but they still had to make a lot of decisions about how to implement it: how many cores, what cluster and cache arrangements, none of which resemble NVIDIA's Grace CPU.

Thanks for the clarification. I was surprised to learn it is not a single chip; thought they did something akin to Apple Silicon integrating some ARM cores on their main chip. Kind of disappointing: they basically asked MediaTek to build a CPU with an NV-Link I/O.

The big picture is probably that GB10 is destined to show up in laptops, but NVIDIA couldn't be bothered to do all the boring work of building the rest of the SoC and Mediatek was the cheapest and easiest partner available. It'll eventually be followed by an Intel SoC with NVIDIA providing the GPU chiplet, but in the meantime the Mediatek CPU solution is good enough.

From NVIDIA's perspective, they need an answer to the growing segment of SoCs with decent sized GPUs and unified memory; their existing solutions at the far end of a PCIe link with a small pool of their own memory just can't work for some important use cases, and providing GPU chiplets to be integrated into other SoCs is how they avoid losing ground in these markets without the expense of building their own full consumer hardware platform and going to war with all of Apple, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm.