I don’t see a price there, so I’m not sure how “overpriced” it is. But it’s a class of product that is expensive across the board, compared to a typical desktop workstation or gaming PC.
The use cases are mostly local AI. That’s very demanding and requires compromises one way or another. You want high memory capacity and high memory bandwidth most of all. You can’t get both without paying out the nose, so you need to find the sweet spot for your specific use cases.
Discrete GPUs give you high bandwidth, but low capacity.
Standard desktop memory gives you high capacity, but low bandwidth (and also low compute speed since CPUs are no good for the workloads).
This type of product is a middle ground. Integrated memory gives you better bandwidth than DDR5, but not as good as a discrete GPU. Integrated GPU/NPU gives you much better performance than a desktop CPU, and can access the full integrated memory directly. Upgradeable memory is not really possible for this class of product.
The real competition for this is a tricked-out MacBook Pro. Those are faster, but they ain’t cheap, and I don’t think Apple even sells any 192GB Macs anymore, and when they did it was close to $10k.
You also have the benefit that, since it’s a single memory pool, it can be used for other things, and allocated dynamically.
Where in a conventional machine, VRAM is exclusively for the GPU to use, and RAM is generally for the system. The capacities are usually fixed (I think it’s possible to offload GPU memory into system memory for some uses, but that’s about it, and your performance usually falls off).
Downside is that because it’s a shared memory pool, everything uses it, so you lose some of the actual capacity for things like your OS.
They don’t even have the 128GB or 192GB options available when you click “Customize Now” the base 32GB option starts at $1,269 USD with no storage. So yeah, just a bit over priced.
That makes it one of the cheaper options in this category.
The GMKtec EVO-X2 is $3500, so a bit cheaper when you factor in storage. I don’t think you can find any 128GB Ryzen 395 systems for cheaper than that. HP’s costs $4700. Beelink’s is $4400.
And then there are similar non-Ryzen systems, like the Nvidia Spark at $4600 or the MacBook Pro is $7k.
I don’t see a price there, so I’m not sure how “overpriced” it is. But it’s a class of product that is expensive across the board, compared to a typical desktop workstation or gaming PC.
The use cases are mostly local AI. That’s very demanding and requires compromises one way or another. You want high memory capacity and high memory bandwidth most of all. You can’t get both without paying out the nose, so you need to find the sweet spot for your specific use cases.
Discrete GPUs give you high bandwidth, but low capacity.
Standard desktop memory gives you high capacity, but low bandwidth (and also low compute speed since CPUs are no good for the workloads).
This type of product is a middle ground. Integrated memory gives you better bandwidth than DDR5, but not as good as a discrete GPU. Integrated GPU/NPU gives you much better performance than a desktop CPU, and can access the full integrated memory directly. Upgradeable memory is not really possible for this class of product.
The real competition for this is a tricked-out MacBook Pro. Those are faster, but they ain’t cheap, and I don’t think Apple even sells any 192GB Macs anymore, and when they did it was close to $10k.
You also have the benefit that, since it’s a single memory pool, it can be used for other things, and allocated dynamically.
Where in a conventional machine, VRAM is exclusively for the GPU to use, and RAM is generally for the system. The capacities are usually fixed (I think it’s possible to offload GPU memory into system memory for some uses, but that’s about it, and your performance usually falls off).
Downside is that because it’s a shared memory pool, everything uses it, so you lose some of the actual capacity for things like your OS.
They don’t even have the 128GB or 192GB options available when you click “Customize Now” the base 32GB option starts at $1,269 USD with no storage. So yeah, just a bit over priced.
Even the 128GB version starts at $3,500 despite being out of stock. Yeah… overpriced.
That makes it one of the cheaper options in this category.
The GMKtec EVO-X2 is $3500, so a bit cheaper when you factor in storage. I don’t think you can find any 128GB Ryzen 395 systems for cheaper than that. HP’s costs $4700. Beelink’s is $4400.
And then there are similar non-Ryzen systems, like the Nvidia Spark at $4600 or the MacBook Pro is $7k.
Just because they’re ALL overpriced doesn’t mean this one isn’t, too
Well, MacBook Pro or also Mac Studio. Pre shortage, you could spec out the Mac Studio with 512 GB of RAM, if you had stupidly deep pockets.