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Watch out for Nvidia and Linux

Could 2025 be the year of the Linux desktop computer?

Yeah, we've heard it all before, a thousand times and every time -- it never happens. Linux looks destined to be consigned to the desktops of geeks and the racks of servers in data-centres.

Or does it?

Interesting moves on the part of semiconductor giant Nvidia may be about to change the desktop computing landscape and part of that change could be a significant shift to Linux as the OS of choice

Nvidia has announced its new "Project DIGITS" desktop computer but it's not this machine which is getting people excited, it's the tech inside it.

At the heart of this new machine is silicon created by Nvidia that offers some pretty impressive specs.

According to the company "Project DIGITS features the new NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, offering a petaflop of AI computing performance for prototyping, fine-tuning and running large AI models".

Kind of makes Microsoft Co-pilot running on a Intel Core processor look a bit feeble doesn't it?

AI is, whether *we* like it or not, going to be an intrinsic part of most future desktop PCs so hardware that is designed from the ground-up to deliver high levels of AI performance will obviously have an advantage in the marketplace. This is where Nvidia has obviously spotted an opportunity and is preparing to make its move.

At the heart of this new GB10 "superchip" are a bunch of CUDA and Tensor cores which are linked to an energy-efficient 20-core CPU based on ARM technology. This combination on a single slab of silicon has the potential to significantly reduce the cost when compared to a more traditional CPU/GPU/NPU setup. The performance and efficiency benefits are just a bonus.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Project DIGITS computer that uses this tech is the price. Just US$3000, barely more than the recently announced RTX5090 GPU on its own.

It will be very interesting to see how well this machine sells when it actually launches in May.

No doubt Nvidia partners will also be rolling out their own GB10-based computers around the same time so there could be a good range of options for those who want to jump ship from the X86/Windows environment and embrace Linux/Nvidia as a perhaps more cost-effective and powerful way to implement or take advantage of AI-based solutions.

If this does give Linux a stronger foothold on the desktop marketplace you can be pretty sure that Microsoft will be scrambling to adapt its own ARM-based Windows to run on the new silicon. Whether the acceptance of Linux will grow quickly during this gap will be very interesting to watch. If it does then Microsoft's dominance of the desktop OS marketplace could be severely rattled, if not destroyed.

Interesting times ahead.

Carpe Diem folks!

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