Nvidia Project Digits: A Linux-powered desktop for AI developers

What's making the headlines at CES 2025 are AI-powered TVs, new smart home gadgets, and fresh laptop releases. For my money, though, the big news from CES is Nvidia Project Digits. This revolutionary desktop AI supercomputer is designed to bring unprecedented computing power to artificial intelligence (AI) developers, researchers, and students. And, by the way, it will be running Nvidia's DGX OS, a customized Ubuntu Linux 22.04 distro.

As you might guess, DGX OS is a Linux distro designed with system-specific optimizations and configurations, drivers, and diagnostic and monitoring tools to provide a fully supported version of Linux for running AI, machine learning, and analytics applications on Nvidia DGX Supercomputers.

On top of that, Nvidia will also provide AI software development kits; orchestration tools; Nvidia NGC catalog frameworks and models; the Nvidia NeMo framework for fine-tuning models; and Nvidia Rapids libraries for data science acceleration. Of course, as an Ubuntu Linux system at heart, you can run Ubuntu and Linux software. So, if you want to, you can play Doom on it. That's probably the first I'll do if I get my hands on one of these devices. 

Now, in a box that appears to be about the size of a Mac mini, Nvidia's Project Digits PC promises to bring a petaflop of AI performance to your desktop. A petaflop, for those of you who don't hang out in supercomputer land, is equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) floating-point operations per second (flops).

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