The idea of Returning to the Office (RTO) is highly controversial. In practice it amounts to a 25% pay cut.
Getting dressed and eating lunch are both expensive. When my dear wife did it, BC (Before Covid), she would wake up at 4 AM, ride trains for 45 minutes, dodge cars on foot for 30 more, and hit her desk for 6:15 AM. Then she would repeat the performance 9 hours later, usually consuming the previous night’s leftovers for lunch at her desk. (Sometimes a co-worker drove her to the station.)
Now she gets up at 6:15, works her 9 hours, and is done by mid-afternoon.
It’s a huge difference in lifestyle while bosses act like it’s no big deal, because people used to do it all the time. They also used to work in coal mines.
The arrogance of people like Andy Jassy over all this is going to come back to bite them in the butt. It should. It’s callous, beyond belief.
But it probably won’t. That’s because it’s aimed at software developers. Amazon and the other Big Tech companies want to get rid of software developers. They think everything can be done by AI. They’ll learn they’re wrong about this as well.
<EOR> End of Rant </EOR>
The Market
What will put butts in seats is the Nvidia DIGITS platform.
It’s a $3,000 supercomputer, based on a chip called the GB10. In performance it’s somewhere between the Grace Hopper chip and the Donald Blackwell chip introduced late last year. Nvidia now calls this the Grace Blackwell platform. (Having once met Admiral Hopper, I find this hysterical. But it does give Nvidia a unique name it can market.) I have no idea what this means for the coming Vera Rubin super-duper chip. Will it become the Donald Rubin platform? Stay tuned.
In historical terms, this could be like the launch of the Sun-1, in 1982. It could be like the launch of the IBM PC in 1981. Or it could be like the launch of the Nintendo Entertaiment System (NES) in 1983.
It will probably fall somewhere within those announcements. Sun systems gave high-end computing power to engineers, and that’s what we’re looking at in the short term. I’m hoping Nvidia has a program to allocate these machines in the early days, making sure they go mainly to scientists and engineers at universities and research institutes. Demand will be overwhelming.
That’s because millions of boys, like my son, grew up using what were essentially deskbound gaming systems. We like to think the desktop era ended with the rise of laptops, but it never really did. Gaming was always the frontier. A few weeks ago, I watched a dozen eager boys pile into a trailer filled with such systems for a birthday party, while their parents stood outside laughing and talking among themselves.
Gaming has been the high end of computing for years.
The Machine
The GB10 is a desktop Linux machine designed to use wall power and can run Large Language Models with 200 billion parameters. Networking two together can double that. Models designed and tested on the desktop can then be run on the Nvidia DGX cloud. Prices start at $3,000. Sign up today.
While the GB10 runs Linux, it’s designed around Nvidia software. The chip runs the latest CUDA cores. The CPU is built around the MediaTek ARM architecture, another stab at the heart of Intel and its fading x86. It uses other Nvidia software like the NeMo framework and the RAPIDs data libraries.
Steven Vaughan-Nichols writes that Taiwanese OEMs are already planning their own MediaTek-based systems, at price points as low as $1,000. How close they will come to the Nvidia standard is debatable. They could be like the Japanese “DOS-like” architectures that came out in the mid-80s, or they could be mainstream devices like the Compaq. (Yes, I was around then.)
Or this could become like the launch of the Apple Macintosh in 1984. The Mac was unable to dislodge IBM (or Microsoft) from corporate America during that decade because its price was higher than what corporate America was willing to pay to outfit mainstream employees, who made-do with MS-DOS for 6 years while it and IBM worked to solve the “640KB” problem, which Microsoft did in 1990 (killing IBM in the process).
Fortunately for Nvidia, Jensen Huang knows this history. He aims to dislodge not only Intel from the mainstream with the Grace Blackwell architecture, but Microsoft as well. Microsoft’s problem is that its Windows on ARM architecture, which would support MediaTek machines, requires an emulator to run many programs.
What May Happen
We could enter 2026 with a two-tier operating system environment, where Nvidia squeezes out Microsoft the way Microsoft did IBM back in the early 1990s. Regardless of whether Microsoft chooses to directly challenge Nvidia’s leadership or support Nvidia’s hardware choices to remain relevant, it’s going to be an interesting few years on the desktop beat.
Millions of people like my son, who has been a gamer since he was a small child, will be sitting down for it. Buy them DIGITS and they’ll be happy to drive an hour each way to sit down in your office.
