NVIDIA’s RTX Spark Is the AI ”Superchip” That Will Power Windows Laptops and Desktops
It was only a matter of time before NVIDIA released a powerful system-on-a-chip (SOC) to take on AMD’s Ryzen AI Max and Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X2 chips. At Computex today, NVIDIA unveiled the RTX Spark, a “superchip” intended to give laptops and small desktops faster AI and graphics performance. You can think of it as a portable sibling to the $3,999 DGX spark AI mini-desktop, except it’s built for Windows instead of Linux. RTX Spark will power new laptops including the Surface Laptop Ultra and Dell XPS 16, as well as systems from “every single major OEM,” according to NVIDIA.
NVIDIA hasn’t dived deep into RTX Spark’s technical features yet, but the company says it offers 1 petaflop of AI computing power, and has 6,144 Blackwell RTX cores and 20 Mediatek Arm CPU cores. NVIDIA says it’s the same as the RTX 5070 laptop GPU but with much lower power. The RTX Spark also has an NPU fast enough to be part of Microsoft’s Copilot+ initiative, which requires a 40 TOPS NPU, but NVIDIA says it mainly affects the tensor cores as part of the chip’s Blackwell GPU for AI performance.
The RTX Spark GPU can directly draw from the chip’s large pool of integrated memory, which can range from 16GB to 128GB, and the chip itself can use anywhere from single-digit wattage up to 80W. And before you ask, no, there are no plans to offer the chip alongside dedicated GPUs.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang pitches RTX Spark as a complete renaissance of the PC, finally turning it into devices designed for AI agents rather than manual human input. “Today, when you think about your phone, the one thing you don’t do with it is make calls,” Huang said on stage at Computex. “You do almost everything else. So that phone means something very different to you, than the old phone.”
NVIDIA has been working with Microsoft for “several years” while designing the RTX Spark, according to NVIDIA representatives. That’s a sign that the company must be aware of Prism’s emulation layer to run older Windows applications on Arm-based chips. Reps also say NVIDIA is working with “all” major anti-cheat providers in popular games, something that holds support for titles like Fortnite in the first batch of Snapdragon Copilot+ systems.
In a blog post provided to the press, Microsoft’s head of Windows and devices, Pavan Davuluri, noted that the company has improved Windows 11’s RTX Spark performance profile. “Whether you’re checking your email or using an agent in the environment to debug, the Windows scheduler on RTX Spark will ensure you get the best performance and performance from your CPU,” he wrote.
While the DGX Spark desktop is mainly aimed at large companies and AI developers, RTX Spark should be more accessible to content creators and people new to AI development. There was also a lot of hype around AI during NVIDIA Jensen Huang’s Computex keynote today.
I’ve seen people who are fully immersed in the NVIDIA ecosystem on their desktops opt for a small RTX Spark laptop for gaming and an AI computer on the go. We haven’t seen NVIDIA ship its SOCs to consumers since the Tegra days, so it will be interesting to see how the RTX Spark fares in today’s highly competitive market.
