Nvidia announces RTX Spark as “the most efficient PC chip ever”

This fall, Nvidia will officially become a PC chip maker like Intel, AMD, Apple and Qualcomm, putting an entire computing chip — not just graphics — at the heart of laptops and miniPCs. after Many months of leaksfinally announces the RTX Spark, the first in a family of chips that will match or outperform the most powerful thin-and-light Windows machines ever, it claims.

“This is the most efficient PC chip ever,” says Mark Overman, senior director of product management at Nvidia, without sharing a single statistic or chart to back it up.

The RTX Spark is actually the same chip as the GB10 out there In DGX Sparkthe “small personal AI supercomputer” that Nvidia launched last year, is now just a family of chips instead of just one. The flagship version appears to be identical in terms of specifications with 20 CPU cores, 6,144 GPU cores, and 128GB of LPDDR5X memory.

But Nvidia says there will be lower versions later, targeting lower prices, and with at least 16GB of RAM.

Like Apple and Qualcomm’s chips, this Nvidia chip is Arm-based silicon, which means legacy Windows software designed for Intel and AMD x86 processors needs to run through an emulation layer in order to work. This can mean decreased performance. But Microsoft has now spent years getting Windows and Its own Prism emulator Ready for Qualcomm chips and now Nvidia chips, Nvidia claims its own graphics and AI chips will take the idea further than ever before.

With the power of RTX Spark, Nvidia boasts, you can render a 90GB 3D scene, edit 12K video, or run graphics intensive Indiana Jones and the Grand Circle At 100 fps and 1440p resolution – all in a 14mm thick laptop without a power cord attached.

And with up to 128GB of unified memory, associated with the previous generation AMD Strix Halo partsAn RTX Spark laptop or desktop can also host 120 billion AI agents, something Microsoft seems excited about for Windows. At Microsoft’s Build conference this week, it will showcase “new Windows security and containment alternatives” that, combined with Nvidia’s OpenShell runtime, “allow personal agents to run securely and under full user control.”

Nvidia claims this adds to “a new paradigm of personal computing where AI is the user experience” and “users no longer need to master complex user interfaces for apps” because you’ll just be talking to your computer instead of needing to use a mouse and keyboard.

Nvidia, for example, has suggested that esports streamers could have their computers automatically turn off the lights, mute their microphone, and change their streaming mode when they want to get away and have dinner. A designer can use Adobe to automatically convert a drawing into a complete image, render a 3D model of it, and then create an AI video on command. A software developer can automatically monitor their GitHub project and fix QA issues independently, with the AI ​​agent taking over the laptop keyboard and mouse cursor for “repetitive and boring” tasks.

Nvidia says that with the RTX Spark’s native AI chips, your data stays private and you won’t burn tokens to do AI stuff.

I’m not convinced that Nvidia has compiled a Star Trek Computer yet, but the company seems to have a lot Of partners on board. Almost every major laptop vendor is counted, with eight specific laptops already confirmed for this fall:

One is from Microsoft, which is putting the Nvidia RTX Spark in a new laptop, which Surface boss Andrew Hill told us is “the most powerful thing we’ve ever made.” It’s called Surface Laptop Ultra:

It seems that these machines are just the beginning. Aevermann says Nvidia partners are already working on more than 30 laptops and more than 10 desktops, with Acer, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, MSI and Lenovo joining the latter.

“The RTX Spark will be a family of products that will attack a lot of different price points,” Aevermann promises. “The overall market opportunity we see is very large.”

In between the bickering efforts between Microsoft and Nvidia, many Windows developers have also joined Arm.

The company notes that “Blender, DaVinci Resolve, Maxon Cinema4D, Maxon Redshift, Topaz Photo, CapCut, Cubase, Bitwig Studio, Affinity by Canva, and more all run natively on Arm today, as do the audio, video, MIDI, and control peripherals they require.”

Adobe is on board, with Special improvements for Premiere and Photoshop Which takes advantage of the new Nvidia chip.

Even games with anti-cheat They turned their noses up at Linux and Steam Deck They now support Windows on Arm as well. Riot Games now offers both, Microsoft wrote league of legends and Valuation To Windows on the arm. Crafton brings PUBGand Nvidia told us it’s working with more developers using Easy Anti-Cheat, BattleEye, and Denuvo. (epic fortnite It actually arrived on Windows on Arm last November After its announcement last March.)

“All the best games will run on the RTX Spark and provide a great experience,” says Aevermann. This is a very high bar to meet!

Here are some other developers Nvidia says it’s working with:

There are still many open questions, of course. Neither Nvidia nor Microsoft have given us a clear idea of ​​how much these PCs might cost, other than that the first batch this fall is “targeting the most premium price points on the market.”

In terms of “all-day battery life,” Aevermann would only say that we should “expect it to be much better than anything we’ve seen before on RTX laptops” and that “you won’t need a charger” if you’re not taking on heavy workloads. He says the chip goes down to “low, low single-digit” wattage, up to 80 watts. The latter means they can theoretically drain larger laptop batteries in about an hour at full power.

In terms of performance, Nvidia didn’t have a single statistic or chart to share, and Aevermann didn’t answer questions about how the RTX Spark family of chips from Intel, AMD, Apple and Qualcomm stacks up, saying Nvidia will have more to share closer to the launch date. But he says that depending on the application, it has roughly the graphical power of an RTX 5070 mobile GPU, and we should expect the CPU portion to be “competitive with anything else out there in the Windows space.”

Nvidia also didn’t say whether these chips, which were manufactured using the TSMC 3 process in partnership with MediaTek, are the same. It is manufactured in the United States Or abroad. This did not receive any comment.

Nvidia also hasn’t commented on whether it plans to offer Linux driver support for the RTX Spark, as it’s currently focused on Windows. He wouldn’t comment on Spark mode in handheld gaming consoles. Just like AMD did with the powerful Strix Halo.

But it answered a question that no, the RTX Spark won’t be paired with additional discrete GPUs — which could limit its potential in non-mini desktops, in the same way. Apple’s Mac Pro is 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 has not shared any evidence When Apple announced Silicon. But when the M1 arrived, it was It upended our concept of laptop performance overnight.