> which is why the crunch has lasted so long,

It's been like a year-ish...

And maybe 2027 is a truly optimistic relief on some level,

> a second wave comes in 2028–29, and a lot of that new capacity is aimed at HBM and server memory, so consumer DDR5 and GDDR will likely ease last.

'Consumer DDR5' has a pretty big set of knock-on effects though.

Unless you are working at a 'tech' company, the norm is that even developer machines will be constrained on memory usage for a given workload[0][1]. IOW companies trying to keep procurement in check wind up looking at procurement cost vs lost productivity.

[0] - Modern infosec and corporate software, at least where I'm at, seems to be vaguely more efficient than electron apps, IOW I can reboot, open teams and my IDE, after 4GBish of my IDE and 1GB of a fresh Teams instance I'm already around 16 of 32GB.

[1] - I had to fight hard to get 32GB as a developer baseline at my org. They wanted 16GB. Ironically the JVM based devs get 64GB but still have slowdown issues on biuld...

"You will be owned and you will be drugged to look like a happy." 20 somethin... Forum.

Maybe I'm missing something but didn't micron exit the consumer DDR market for HBM? I don't see a rollback from that. When you say DDR will ease last, in what reality would memory makers go back to a market they left behind?

So do you think there will be a big crash and memory will get really cheap in 2030, or do you believe that AI demand is strong enough to sustain all this buildout?

It seems like this list also doesn't account for China and state sponsored memory industry (which will be more immune to a downturn)

I don’t even really think it’s “fine.” It’s hard to even understand who they are for. Just Josh Tech on YouTube did a great review of these laptops as they’re hitting the market.

Good battery life is probably the biggest upside, but the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Zephyrus G16 is just about as good (more on that alternative later).

The downsides are numerous:

- Middling GPU performance compared to discrete RTX mobile GPUs. You’re barely trading blows with an 5070Ti with the top end Spark chip. And yes, Nvidia markets RTX Spark for gaming, so we need to judge them in that context, too. Windows on ARM isn’t amazing for gaming for various reasons including lack of anti-cheat compatibility.

- Compatibility and/or performance issues on Windows ARM. You’re running a lot of stuff non-native

- As you mentioned, the CPU cores are nothing to write home about with very mid single core performance.

- Suffers greatly from “why am I not buying a MacBook Pro?” syndrome

- Poor/no Linux support, in a world where when Linux and Mac get the most attention for AI workflows.

I think there may be a case for being a good performance value for AI training, but for local inference I’m not seeing how that makes sense. Heck, for local inference I think it’s better to run a workstation as a server and then use the laptop as a client. You benefit from a better hardware value as well as putting less of the strain on the laptop, saving battery life. The fact that it’s plugged in means you can run long-running jobs and scheduled tasks, which is often the strength of local AI. The cost of one of these RTX Spark laptops will get you a dual R9700 inference workstation if you’re smart about the build.

You’ve also got projects like Strata that are going to define trends for how people run local AI. Why bother with $6000 integrated graphics machines or trying to squeeze quality models into one or two expensive 24-32GB GPUs when you can get 60 tok/s on Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on a 16GB RX 9060XT ($500) with 64GB of DDR4 RAM?

Want to do local inference on a laptop? Grab a Zephyrus G16, get the 64GB/RTX 5080 spec, run Strata, then as a bonus you can run AAA games at full blast. This costs less than $5000.

Waiting ~1 year for the M7 Pro chip on MacBook Pro models is another option that is almost certainly a better idea if the rumors about that chip are true.

I’m struggling to find a way to find a worse value buying something, anything that isn’t an RTX Spark. For that money there are just so many alternatives.

Yeah but this is all there is until what 2028? 2029? And those could cost 2x-3x too.

I feel like even if a next generation of chips dropped tomorrow, it'd be a while until they can scale up production and actually start selling products you or I could realistically purchase and by that time this new generation chip would already by a couple of years old with something much better and powerful in the final stages of design.

If it's anything like my DGX Spark, the "premium" is almost 100% just the memory cost, not the GPU or ARM core.

10 months ago when I got my Spark it was competitive in price with a similarly spec'd out Mac Studio. As RAM prices have gone even more parabolic, so has its price. And so has the Mac's. And the Strix Halo competitors.

May always be behind with how fast things change, you think?

The difference is that streaming zero latency 4k video is incredibly difficult and always results in serious compromises. For AI programming, the end output is very small, not latency sensitive very easy to stream over the internet.

I'm sure you can come up with some scenario where you are programming in the wilderness with no internet connection but the market for that has to be in the tens of people.

No, the AMD ones he’s talking about allow the GPU to address that memory as well: they’re “APU’s” that share system RAM as GPU memory

That said the compute power of the GB10 is awesome, my DGX Spark-like has been better than I expected.

> The AMD hardware is x86_64, which means lower battery life on average for normal users [...]

A Ryzen AI Max+ 395 powered tablet with 70Wh [0] gets the same battery life given the same task as a Nvidia N1X powered laptop with 99.9 Wh [1].

Power Consumption in their "Cyberpunk / Stress Test" is also lower at Ø109.3 (108.8-110.8) Watt for the x86_64 vs Ø134.5 (132.1-137.5) Watt for the arm64 system using the same settings, resolution and display brightness. They also get the same performance when normalising for resolutions and settings in Cyberpunk, so this is not an instance of one providing significantly more performance.

[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-ROG-Flow-Z13-GZ302EA-Conv...

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-ProArt-P16-RTX-Spark-Lapt...

To add, battery life on this chip hasn’t been that impressive [1]. It’s basically matching recent MacBook Pros, while sporting a significantly larger battery. Both AMD and Intel have made significant strides in improving power consumption on their latest core designs, to the point where there isn’t a lot of difference anymore.

[1] https://www.lttlabs.com/articles/2026/10/16/nvidia-rtx-spark...

A mini pc doesnt have a battery. Your point doesnt seem very coherent.

> Aside from this, I’m led to believe that the AMD stack when it comes to local models has more overhead related to its need to translate more NVIDIA native instructions and therefore can be less performant than Nvidia. Not sure how true this is anymore, but ive yet to hear otherwise.

Uh, well you'd just download lemonade server and use models designed explicitly for the hardware from hugging face.

https://lemonade-server.ai/

It's supported by AMD.

Why? Flying business everywhere is substantially more expensive than a one time cost of $6k for a laptop. A single business ticket anywhere overseas matches or exceeds that in most cases.

Last first class ticket I bought was US$13k, or a bit less than $500/hr in the air for the trip I took. A 6k laptop that I'm gonna use for 8-12 hrs/day for a couple of years is a rounding error in comparison.

What? I have spent $10k on a computer but would never fly business or first class, that shit is way too expensive. Two trips would buy a new $10k computer!

I agree with your skepticism.

3.8k is less than the preorder cost of the DGX Spark over a year ago (Oct 14th, 2025).

He got a slick deals deal. Great site.

The worst it can get is having to reinstall windows with an image modified to run first setup with a local account. Though with a lot of manufacturers it's a good idea to do that anyway to also avoid all of the bloatware they preinstall.

For Win10, I had to keep it disconnected from the network throughout the install process. Once you're connected, you have to do it all over again.

To be fair, TFA lists more reasons to avoid Windows:

> Mine include the privacy concessions during setup, the years spent waiting for Microsoft to let people put the taskbar on the side of the screen again, and the advertising.

Of course you don't have to agree on all of them, but please don't assume everyone acts only because they can't find a tutorial on the net!

Which engine?

But does it go into detail about those changes?

Because that sounds interesting! But I didn't see anything like that when I've (admittedly) skimmed through the review.

Yeah, a copy of office I bought bricking myself, even while constantly keeping office autoupdate running was my last straw with them. Fortunately, LibreOffice seems to be mostly good enough now.

I wonder. I sort of accidentally discovered that Rufus could edit my arm64 windows 11 install media without problem - adding a local account and bypassing the need for domain login (just as it does for amd64).

This isn't a new trick - just the regular approach to editing windows install media.

I haven’t experienced any of this on my win 11 sim racing rig. I wonder why? I was thinking then i remembered - I ran a script I found that removed copilot, and a lot of other shit. Can’t remember the name it was on GitHub. I only use that computer to run iracing and LMU and it’s been updating fine.

Shouldn’t have to do that of course, but it can be done.