Nvidia’s DGX Spark, the company’s new $4,000 mini PC platform powered by the Grace Blackwell GB10 superchip, is under fire after John Carmack, the former CTO of Oculus VR, began raising questions about real-world performance and power draw. His comments were enough to draw tech support from Framework and even AMD, with the offer of an AMD-driven Strix Halo-powered alternative.
In a post on X, Carmack said that the DGX Spark appears to max out at 100 watts of power draw, which is less than half of its 240-watt rating. While Nvidia advertises one petaflop of sparse FP4 compute, Carmack assumes the dense equivalent should be closer to 125 teraflops, and says he’s getting far less than that. He also flagged “spontaneous rebooting on a long run,” asking if the system had been “de-rated before launch.” (Expand the tweet below to see his comments.)
