TinyBox AI accelerator now available starting at $15k, available in AMD 7900XTX and Nvidia RTX 4090 variants

The TinyBox AI accelerator is now available on sale on the tinygrad website starting at $15k. This small 16.25-inch deep, 12U freestanding unit sports six AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX or Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs designed for deep learning and AI acceleration applications. While the computer is relatively more expensive versus consumer gaming desktop PCs, it’s much more affordable than a single Nvidia H100 or AMD MI300X accelerator, which are priced between $10 to $40k apiece.

tinygrad founder George Hotz shared the news on X about the availability of TinyBox, saying that they have 13 units in stock as of August 27. He also claims that it offers “the best perf/$ ML box in the world” and that it’s fully networkable. Although the company faced some challenges with the AMD GPUs it used for its systems, it was eventually able to find a solution to this problem. At the same time, it also added the option to use Nvidia GPUs instead to avoid AMD’s driver instability, although this comes at a 67% premium.

Despite these seemingly high prices, the company reportedly already has 583 pre-orders for the system. And, with the drama with AMD’s GPUs behind it, it looks like that tinygrad is ready to go full steam ahead with the sale of its TinyBox AI accelerators. Companies have a choice between the more affordable AMD GPU or the Nvidia system. However, as the tinygrad said in a Tweet before, “If you like to tinker and feel pain, buy red. The driver still crashes the GPU and hangs sometimes, but we can work together to improve it.”

We'd like to believe that it has finally solved the issues with the AMD GPUs. Hence, it’s making it available to the market. But with the popularity of Nvidia in the AI accelerator space, it does make sense for the company to give this option, too. It’s just unfortunate, though, that the Intel Arc-powered TinyBox is still in the prototype stage and that it has no plans to ship it. It would’ve been nice if we had the option for that as well, so we hope that the company changes its mind in the future and starts shipping ‘blue’ models of the TinyBox.