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Nvidia has officially unveiled its rumoured N1 and N1X chips at Computex under the RTX Spark brand, bringing a chipset to rival Apple, Intel, Qualcomm and AMD efforts in the laptop and mini PC space. The "superchip" in its fully unlocked form includes a 6144-core Blackwell RTX graphics card (equivalent to an RTX 5070 desktop GPU) alongside a 20-core Grace 3nm ARM CPU custom-built with MediaTek and 128GB of unified LPDDR5X memory.
Unsurprisingly, Nvidia is pitching RTX Spark as an AI-capable chipset, with "1 petaflop of FP4 AI performance" to run AI models and agents locally (eg via OpenClaw). Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also bigged up Spark's gaming credentials with the ability to play triple-A games at 1440p 100fps - which sounds about right for an RTX 5070 laptop machine using frame generation when paired with a suitably powerful CPU.
For its part, Microsoft has detailed how Windows 11 is changing to deliver Spark's "industry-leading performance per watt" via Nvidia's heterogeneous architecture, while still allowing standard 32-bit and 64-bit x86 apps to run via Prism emulation. It's not clear if other operating systems will be able to run on RTX Spark hardware, but the similar hardware in the developer-focused DGX Spark comes with an OS built on Linux. Adobe is also working on bespoke versions of Photoshop and Premiere, and according to PC Gamer, Nvidia is working with makers of esports and "forever game" titles like Fortnite, Valorant, League of Legends and PUBG to ensure anti-cheat solutions are workable on ARM.
Eight RTX Spark laptops have been announced thus far: the Asus ProArt P16 and P14, the Dell XPS 16 Creator Edition, the HP OmniBook X 14 and OmniBook Ultra 16, the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9n, the Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra and the MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI+. Nvidia has also announced a series of mini PCs from the likes of Acer, The initial lineup will eventually swell to 30 laptops and 10 desktops.
Would you buy a Nvidia ARM laptop running Windows? (282 votes)
- Yes
- Maybe
- No
Relatively few spec sheets have been released for RTX Spark laptops, but we expect these to be top-tier devices with high-end components, with Nvidia promising "all-day battery life" and "premium displays". Microsoft's machine, for example, comes with a 15-inch Mini LED 3270x2180 display that can hit 2000 nits in HDR, while the ProArt laptops have high-res OLED screens, up to 128GB of RAM, up to 2TB of SSD storage and 90 or 100Wh batteries. Finally, the MSI Prestige option is a transforming laptop/tablet and has a 16-inch 4K OLED with a 100Wh battery.
As usual, no official pricing and availability information isn't available for either laptops nor desktops - expect them to be expensive, but hopefully cheaper than the $3500 DGX Spark. The first machines are expected to ship this autumn, so we should learn more before too long.
What do you make of the Nvidia Computex announcements? Are you excited to see more competition in the laptop and desktop CPU space? Would this make a killer gaming handheld? Does Nvidia's huge warchest give it an unfair advantage? Let me know your thoughts on any or all of these questions in the comments below.