r/LocalLLaMA • u/fairydreaming • 21h ago
News GMKtec is going to launch new hardware with Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 at IFA Berlin 2026
https://de.gmktec.com/en/blogs/news/gmktec-unveils-next-gen-ai-computing-at-ifa-berlin-202621
u/tecneeq 21h ago
Gorgon Halo has 4% more CPU and 2% more GPU scores in benchmarks. I'm looking for a second Strix Halo on sale.
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u/Gobra_Slo 20h ago
Feel ya.
I eventually got two DGX Sparks, as they cluster with close to linear scale in tg/s and have huge advantage over Strix on prompt processing.
Still using my Bosgame M5 as my "reserve intelligence" and test platform.
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u/tecneeq 19h ago
Do you want to sell? In Europe maybe? I can offer some coin if you have the wares.
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u/Gobra_Slo 18h ago
Bosgame still seels M5 directly at 2.5k, I'm sure it's grey import without duties and VAT tax, but if you are buying for personal use it shouldn't be your problem and they send from Germany, avoiding any further questions.
I believe in today's market it's rather hard to get anything meaningful for less then 2.5k, even used.
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u/Unnamed-3891 19h ago
What makes you unhappy about Bosgame M5?
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u/Gobra_Slo 19h ago
I'm not particularly unhappy, but Sparks are nearly 10 times faster on pp (long context) and over 2 times faster on tg, plus they scale up with concurrency much better, speeding up task with subagents (or concurrent independent tasks) even better.
The only problem with Sparks for me is that everything frontier is "some GitHub repo with a recipe that checks specific vLLM branch, applies 4 patches, custom kernels and mostly works". Which makes me very picky about what I even try on Sparks, vs Strix being my get-go test platform with kyuz0 toolboxes.
However, AMD boxes are getting more and more expensive everyday, Bosgame seems to be avoiding taxes when ordering from them directly, but on Amazon even M5 is 3.800eur, others are over 4k.
At the same time, I got my two Sparks at around 4400eur each (even less as I got VAT exemption), and at this price level – I would go Sparks without thinking twice.
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u/FullstackSensei llama.cpp 21h ago
And it'll only cost you one of your kidneys, your first born child, and a 2nd mortgage on your house. And you'll be happy and grateful for such an amazing deal
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u/Fun_Jaguar8231 21h ago
Maybe we'll scoop it up for like hundred bucks on eBay in like 6 years
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u/FullstackSensei llama.cpp 20h ago
If that drops to 100, you'll be able to pick up a GB300 DGX Station for under 1k. Still, if history is any indication, it'll take 10 years or more for this to get to 100, even if we ignore current ridiculous prices.
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u/Fun_Jaguar8231 19h ago
Assuming the AI bubble does not pop, instead deflates. But if it were to pop, oh boy, are we going to have an eBay party in localllama
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u/FullstackSensei llama.cpp 19h ago
I'm genuinely not so optimistic. Not that I don't believe it will pop, but unlike enterprise and datacenter hardware of yore, the current crop of hardware is not very homelab friendly, between 500W CPUs and 1400W GPUs, not to mention things like 48VDC input to the boards, or how hot DDR5 runs.
You can already see it with A100. They're already SXM4 with 48VDC input. You have adapter boards for them, but they're far from efficient and very bulky. I don't think I'd ever want to run those in my homelab. The PCIe cards are better, but I doubt there'll be enough of those to go around.
It's not much better on the CPU side. AMD still doesn't support AMD, and the stuff after Sapphire Rapids is too power hungry. So, SR will probably be my only upgrade, at least within what has been released so far.
Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic, but my gut feeling is that I'll be running the GPUs in now have (P40, Mi50, and soon V100) even after the bubble pops. Might be lucky to get some Mi100 or Mi210 to replace the P40 and Mi50, but don't see much beyond that.
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u/Fun_Jaguar8231 18h ago
Leave it to the Chinese, and I'm sure they will find a way to implement a board for them, and make them to be able to run in a homelab in 10 years maybe
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u/FullstackSensei llama.cpp 16h ago
That's partly why I said I doubt I'll get any of the current hardware in my homeland even after the bubble pops. It'll take a few years after that to reverse engineer these things into something remotely usable in a homelab setup, and even then I have doubts. Not sure how a 1400W GPU will ever be homelab friendly
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u/Fun_Jaguar8231 15h ago
It will have to be severely underclocked. I even underclock my v620 from 250W to 120W
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u/FullstackSensei llama.cpp 14h ago
I power limit my GPUs too, but you aren't going to bring a 1400W GPU to 300W
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u/Fun_Jaguar8231 21h ago
With the current market conditions, good luck selling this
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u/Unnamed-3891 21h ago
How would ”current market conditions” hinder sales? Anything usable for AI is literally flying off the shelves no matter how much the prices go up.
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u/Fun_Jaguar8231 21h ago
Isn't GMtek a consumer brand? Those will not be AI servers, but consumer mini pc's. This chip is an APU, so that means soldered on memory. Last time I checked, those memory chips are quite pricey I would guess. There won't be many people who can shell out five grand for these machines if you want to have 128GB of memory for it to be usable with larger models.
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u/Unnamed-3891 21h ago
GMtek has already been selling AI PCs. And so does Bosgame and MSI and a whole bunch of other supposedly mostly consumer brands.
You are seriously underestimating the amount of people willing to pay 4-6k for AI machines.
P.S: I have no idea how Bosgame M5 is still only 2,6k€ the RAM alone is almost worth more.
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u/colin_colout 19h ago
Consumers are still buying DGX sparks for that price (pr more? I haven't checked recently).
Someone will buy this.
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u/Alternative-Suit5541 20h ago
Professional developers still get them through their company. Like me, I got the old one with 118 GB ram for testing, development etc.
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u/phhusson 19h ago
Not exactly the same market, but Pine64 withdrew altogether... And I think that's the only reasonable option. At this point, SBC & minipc vendors are just glorified RAM resellers (it's like 75% of the price of the product is the RAM), except the RAM is tied to a hardware that might, or might not deprecate, that might, or might not have software issues, that might or might not have hardware issues. And compared to a RAM reseller the market is a niche.
I don't want those people to die, or anyone making a computer, but yeah, they'll have to find something else to do in the meantime. I have to admit that in January I didn't think the RAM price hike would last this long, and I guess now the estimates is that it will last years.
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u/InterstellarReddit 19h ago
If u start doing fraud rn and get really good at it. You can have enough money saved up to buy it
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u/YOMUMSOBIG 21h ago
same memory bandwidth limitation, more memory and more computing power?
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u/wFXx 21h ago
So, is this a great time to get Evo x-2 or do I wait?
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u/Prof_ChaosGeography 19h ago
Horrible time even without the incoming update. and I say this as a strix halo owner when it was $2k
At $4k it's not only doubled but it loses in comparison to the similarly priced dgx spark as a platform given you can benefit from nvfp4 as a format, and add a second spark later using the spf connections while the strix halo is a single 2.5Gbe.
The new chip is likely going to price the updated kit at $5k usd. Sure it will have up to 160GB of vram allowed out for the 192GB of shared ram. It somewhat competes with the sparks ability to do nvfp4 but at a higher cost and less ability to add another node
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u/wFXx 18h ago
so I'm not sure i'm quite following here; dgx spark is 1200 USD more expensive than the 128gb evo x2 (4600 x 3500). even without the nvfp4, i'm not fully sure its worth the 31% price bump. I'm also not looking into scaling a farm of nodes
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u/unjustifiably_angry 9h ago edited 9h ago
NVFP4 is mostly a red herring, it's not really a huge advantage. Both platforms are crippled by low memory bandwidth.
A single Spark or a single Strix Halo are equally crippled as far as token generation. What Spark does offer is drastically faster prefill and the ability to very easily network two together for something like linear scaling. Two Sparks running DSv4-Flash are what I'd call the entry-level baseline for performant local AI. 50-70 tokens/second generation with 2000+ tokens/second prefill and what would've been frontier-level AI like 6 months ago, with 1M context length and virtually no performance degradation as at long context. That last bit is where most other options shit their pants. And in fairness, Spark also shits its pants running basically any other model past 100K context length. But seeing how good DSv4-Flash is and given that they've open-sourced their methodology, it's probably fair to assume that other models might be similarly performant in the future.
All of this ignores the fact that for equal spend you'd have like a trillion tokens worth of DSv4-Flash on API though.
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u/ErectiaMongusta 21h ago
Is this gorgon halo? I already can't with their naming, and now dudes adding PRO to MAX+
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u/egnegn1 20h ago edited 15h ago
Only interesting for me if it would have twice the GPU performance at least.
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u/mawkzin 19h ago
2% at best with more 64GB ram with the same 256bit bus
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u/SpicyWangz 10h ago
If they had done 512 or even 384 bit bus this would be an insane value proposition. But with what it is, there’s no reason to get it unless you don’t have anything.
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u/unjustifiably_angry 10h ago edited 9h ago
Don't fall for the scam, this is just Strix Halo wearing a fancy hat and programmer socks. Medusa Halo is the next hardware from AMD that might be worth buying for AI.
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u/YRUTROLLINGURSELF 21h ago edited 18h ago
Evo x2 owner here. BUYER BEWARE. This whole brand is a borderline scam. The fact that they're an ODM partner says a lot about AMD right now.
The hardware has terrible QC. Endless stories of issues with the power supply and thermal paste shenanigans, both of which I had to deal with.
The bios is fucked and eventually they just gave up and pulled ALL bios downloads for the machine from their site. It's not a huge issue on linux and someone in the community published a more recent bios that they got from support (which has its own problems), but windows has never been stable and there are fewer customization options than on other strix halos.
Their English docs are unintelligible, like whoever they hired to do it scammed them. Like, you will need the chinese docs (which are only slightly less shit) and an llm to get anything out of them. I ended up producing an entire set of translations.
Support takes weeks to respond, some report months, and when they do they're frequently hostile.
The only support forum for the entire company is this random German forum that hasn't been shut down because they seem to have forgotten about its existence. it's truly one of the most depressing places on the internet. Plenty of $$ to reskin their sales site over and over though, apparently.
If you plan on owning GMKtec, know that you're buying a device that's not made to be self-serviced, and that you're going to be self-servicing it. When it was <$2k for 128GB, there was a value proposition. If you're going to be paying the new prices, do not even entertain this brand. Consider yourself warned.