This fall, Nvidia will officially become a chipmaker for consumer PCs like Intel, AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm, putting a complete computing chip – not just graphics – at the heart of laptops and small PCs. After months of leaks, it’s finally announcing the RTX Spark, the first in a family of chips that will meet or beat the smallest and lightest Windows machines ever, it says.
“This is the most efficient PC chip ever built,” said Nvidia’s senior director of product management Mark Aevermann — without sharing a single statistic or chart to back it up.
The RTX Spark is the same GB10 chip in the DGX Spark, the “personal AI supercomputer” released by Nvidia last year, now it’s a family of chips instead of just one. The flagship version appears to be the same spec-to-spec with 20 CPU cores, 6,144 GPU cores and 128GB of LPDDR5X memory.
But Nvidia says there will be smaller versions later, targeting lower prices, and 16GB of less RAM.
Like Apple and Qualcomm’s chips, this Nvidia chip is an Arm-based silicon, which means that legacy Windows software designed for Intel and AMD’s x86 processors needs to go through an emulation layer to run. That can mean lower performance. But Microsoft has now spent years preparing Windows and its Prism emulator for Qualcomm and now Nvidia chips, and Nvidia says its own graphics and AI chops will take the idea further than ever.
With the power of RTX Spark, Nvidia is proud, you can render a 90GB 3D scene, edit a video with a resolution of 12K, or play with a clear power. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle at a smooth 100fps at 1440p resolution – all in a 14mm thick laptop without a connected power cord.
And with up to 128GB of integrated memory, tied with AMD’s previous Strix Halo components, an RTX Spark laptop or desktop can host 120 billion AI agents, something Microsoft seems to be happy about with Windows. At Microsoft’s Build conference this week, it will be showing off “new Windows security and features” that, along with Nvidia’s OpenShell runtime, “allow human agents to run securely and under full user control.”
Nvidia says this adds to “a new version of personal computing where AI is UX” and “users no longer need to know complex application UIs” because you’ll just talk to your PC instead of needing to use a mouse and keyboard.
Nvidia suggested that, for example, an esports streamer could get their PC to automatically turn off the lights, mute the microphone, and change their streaming mode when they want to kick back and grab dinner. A designer can use Adobe to automatically convert a drawing to a full image, create a 3D model of it, and create an AI video with just a question. A software developer can automatically monitor his GitHub project and automatically fix QA issues, an AI agent takes over the keyboard and mouse cursor of a laptop to perform “repetitive and boring” tasks.
Nvidia says that with RTX Spark’s local AI chops, your data stays private and you won’t burn tokens to do AI stuff.
I’m not sure Nvidia put it together Star Trek computer yet, but it seems that the company has a lot of partners on the board. Almost every major laptop vendor is accounted for, with eight laptops already confirmed for this fall:
One of those comes from Microsoft, which is putting Nvidia RTX Spark in a new laptop that Surface boss Andrew Hill told us is “the most powerful thing we’ve ever done.” It’s called the Surface Laptop Ultra:
Image: Microsoft
That mission is obviously just the beginning. Aevermann says Nvidia’s partners are already working on more than 30 laptops and more than 10 desktops, with Acer, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, MSI, and Lenovo all present.
“RTX Spark will be a family of products that will hit many different price points,” promises Aevermann. “The overall market opportunity we see is quite large.”
Image: Nvidia
And amid Microsoft’s wrangling efforts with Nvidia, many Windows developers are also on board with Arm.
The company points out that “Blender, DaVinci Resolve, Maxon Cinema4D, Maxon Redshift, Topaz Photo, CapCut, Cubase, Bitwig Studio, Affinity by Canva and more run natively on Arm today, as do the audio, video, MIDI, and related control they need.”
Adobe is on board, with special configurations for Premiere and Photoshop that use Nvidia’s new chip.
Even games with anti-cheats that stuck their noses in Linux and Steam Deck now support Windows on Arm, too. Microsoft notes that Riot Games now delivers both League of Legends again A hero on Windows on Arm. Krafton delivers PUBGand Nvidia tells us that it is working with additional developers using Easy Anti-Cheat, BattlEye and Denuvo. (Epics Fortnite it already came to Windows on Arm last November after being announced last March.)
Aevermann says “all top games will run on RTX Spark and provide a great experience.” That is the highest bar you will ever meet!
Here are some developers Nvidia says it’s working with:
Image: Nvidia
There are still many open questions, of course. Neither Nvidia nor Microsoft gave us a clear idea of how much these computers would cost, except that the first batch this fall “targets the highest price points in the market.”
On “all-day battery life,” Aevermann can only say that we should “expect it to be far better than anything you’ve seen before on RTX laptops” and that “you won’t need a charger” if you’re not pushing heavy loads. The chip goes down to “low, low single-digit” wattage and goes up to 80 watts, he says. The latter means they can drain large laptop batteries within an hour of being fully charged.
In his performance, Nvidia didn’t have a single statistic or chart to share, and Aevermann wouldn’t answer questions about how the RTX Spark family stacks up against chips from Intel, AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm, saying Nvidia will have plenty to share next to launch. But he does say that it depends on the application, with the graphics capabilities of the RTX 5070 mobile GPU, and that we should expect the CPU part to “compete with anything else in the Windows space.”
Nvidia also won’t say whether these chips, made with the TSMC 3 process in collaboration with MediaTek, are manufactured in the US or abroad. That got no comment.
Nvidia also wouldn’t comment on whether it plans to offer Linux driver support for RTX Spark, as it currently focuses on Windows. It won’t comment on putting Spark in gaming handhelds, as AMD did with its powerful Strix Halo.
But it answered the question that no, the RTX Spark will not be paired with other discrete GPUs – which would limit its power to desktops beyond the small ones, in the same way that Apple’s Mac Pro was limited when its Arm-based chips broke compatibility with discrete GPUs.
It probably doesn’t matter that Nvidia doesn’t share evidence to back up its claims. Back in 2020, Apple had no proof when it announced Apple Silicon. But when the M1 arrived, it revolutionized our idea of laptop performance overnight.
