Two machines built for local AI inference—NVIDIA's DGX Spark and AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 395—arrive at a crossroads where the decisive question is not which is faster, but faster at what. The Spark processes prompts at five times the speed of its rival, yet the two are nearly indistinguishable in generating output, a distinction that maps almost perfectly onto how different people actually work. Beneath the benchmarks lies a further humbling truth: software backend choices can shift apparent performance as much as the hardware gap itself, and the price difference, once framed as two-to-one, has qu