Since its delayed launch, Nvidia’s DGX Spark has received mixed reviews. It is said to be technically interesting yet comes at a high price while not delivering enough power for the cost. John Carmack, famed for his work on Doom, highlighted thermal issues with the device, pointing out that it only manages a power draw of 100 watts—well below its rated 240 watts—resulting in performance that is about half of what Nvidia claims.

“DGX Spark appears to be maxing out at only 100 watts power draw, less than half of the rated 240 watts, and it only seems to be delivering about half the quoted performance (assuming 1 PF sparse FP4 = 125 TF dense BF16) . It gets quite hot even at this level."—John Carmack

Carmack added that the device gets quite hot, even triggering reports of spontaneous reboots, pointing to serious thermal concerns. These issues have cast doubt on whether Nvidia had adjusted the device’s performance ratings pre-launch.

Moreover, the implications of these thermal throttling issues raise questions about the viability of the DGX Spark as a compact AI APU in laptop PCs. Carmack speculated that perhaps the chip is too large and power-hungry for portable applications, especially given the DGX Spark’s compact size, which limits thermal management.

Nvidia is renowned for its dedicated hardware to enhance FP4 performance, but such optimizations may not be sufficient to meet real-world operational needs in device configurations that are less spacious and more thermal-restrictive than a desktop setup.

At present, the hardware community remains cautious about the DGX Spark and its potential as a mobile computing solution.