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0 pointscmrdporcupine2mo ago0 comments

Exactly this. I'm not sure why people keep drumming the "a Mac or Strix Halo is faster/cheaper" drum. Different market.

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...

0 comments

mapontosevenths2mo ago

I have this device, it's exactly as you say. This is a device for AI research and development. My buddies mac ultra beats it squarely for inference workloads, but for real tinkering it can't be beat.

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.

lostmsu2mo ago

I got ASUS ROG Flow Z13 128G with Ryzen AI 395, and I am able to train nanoGPT with little effort. On Windows (haven't tried Linux), where ROCm was just released recently.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052535

cmrdporcupineOP2mo ago

I had my finger over the buy button for various Strix Halo machines for weeks.

I ended up going with the Asus GB10 because if the goal is to "learn me some AI tooling" I didn't want to have to add "learn me some only recently and shallowly supported-in-linux AMD tooling" to the mix.

I hate NVIDIA -- the company -- but in this case it comes down to pure self-interest in that I want to add some of this stuff to my employable skill set, and NVIDIA ships the machine with all the pieces I need right in the OS distribution.

Plus I have a bias for ARM over x86.

Long run I'm sure I'll end up with a Strix Halo type machine in my collection at some point.

But I also expect those machines to not drop in price, and perhaps even go up, as right now the 128GB of RAM in them is worth the price of the whole machine.

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