Compact AI workstations in comparison: Nvidia DGX Spark meets AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395

Nvidia announced the DGX Spark platform first. AMD delivered the direct response with the Strix Halo architecture and, interestingly, brought the corresponding chips to the market even earlier than the competitor. As a direct opponent to the Nvidia GB10, the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is typically also paired with 128 GB of memory, enabling the execution of large local models. In various AI benchmarks and pure inference speed, the chips are nearly on par, especially in FP16 and FP64 tasks. The memory bandwidth and many other performance figures are also identical on paper. Therefore, it is worth considering systems like the HP ZGX Nano G1n AI Station as well as systems like the Bosgame M5.

The two systems’ underlying processor architectures are fundamentally different from one another. While Nvidia uses an ARM-based Grace module for the GB10 Superchip, AMD relies on the classic x86 architecture with Zen 5 cores for the Ryzen AI Max+ 395. This difference has a significant impact on software compatibility. AMD’s x86 platform scores points with extensive support for established legacy applications and slips seamlessly into the Windows…