After a lot of leaks, a whole lot of rumours, and me boring the crap out of Nvidia’s PRs about it many times over the years, the N1X CPU, now incorporated in the RTX Spark SoC, has finally been unveiled. It’s been one of the most well-known secrets in the industry—that Nvidia would one day release a laptop SoC, pairing a MediaTek Arm chiplet with an Nvidia GPU core, to create its own notebook platform and here we are.
With the full RTX Spark “superchip”, codenamed the N1X, users can expect up to 20 Grace CPU cores and 6144 RTX Blackwell GPU cores, alongside up to 128 GB of unified LPDDR5x memory. And I think the ‘up to’ parts of that statement are doing a lot of heavy lifting here, because this isn’t just a single laptop processor but a full lineup of notebook SoCs starting in the autumn of this year.
And that’s welcome news, because in a RAMpocalypse world of ever-increasing hardware prices, a chip that’s wedded to 128 GB of any kind of memory is going to be prohibitively expensive. But, while Mark Aevermann, consumer product marketing lead of RTX Spark, wouldn’t be drawn on details of the different chips we might expect to see, he did note that “RTX Spark is going to be a family of products that are going to attack a lot of different price points” and that “across the entire family you’ll see configurations from 16 GB all the way up to 128 GB.”
Not that I expect a 16 GB RTX Spark laptop to be cheap but at least that will be a far more affordable SKU, and likely a more gaming-oriented chip, too. Though I wouldn’t necessarily expect to see laptops using those lower-end chips at launch in the autumn, as right now Nvidia has only shown off six very premium machines from Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, and MSI.
“Over time,” says Aevermann, “you can expect over 30 laptops and over ten or so desktops initially planned.”
But with Nvidia promising wattage figures from up to 80 W down to the “low, low single digits” that does make me think about handhelds, especially after Intel’s announcement of the G3 Extreme in the past week. Aevermann introduced the RTX Spark as “the most efficient PC chip ever built… a new type of SoC that is both built for the future of computers as agents, as well as a fantastic creation and gaming experience on a single device with exceptional portability.” If that doesn’t get jammed into a new Shield handheld my ghast will be utterly flabbered.
NvidiaNvidia
Though Nvidia was also very careful in the briefing ahead of today’s announcement to note that it was not making any comments about handhelds.
Laptops are not the only form factor Nvidia has been talking about, though, as it’s also said that mini PCs, along the same lines as the Linux-powered DGX Spark, will also be releasing in the autumn with the RTX Spark chip inside. The likes of Acer, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, MSI, and Lenovo will have systems ready to roll, which could make for a real interesting comparison with the Steam Machine whenever that does arrive.
NvidiaNvidia
The biggest issue for the RTX Spark as a gaming SoC, however, is the fact that it’s running a custom Arm and not an x86 CPU core. That means running Windows-on-Arm as the operating system, and that means leaning heavily on the Microsoft’s Prism emulator. This is the layer which translates x86 code for WoA devices right now, such as those from Qualcomm, and Nvidia seems pretty confident that it’s worked out a lot of the kinks.
Though Aevermann does also note that, while you can theoretically get RTX 5070-level performance out of the RTX Spark’s GPU core, that is heavily dependent on the application. And I think you can translate that to mean it’s completely dependent on how well a given application copes with that emulation layer.
Nvidia has a lot of skin in the game here, but also a lot of deep contacts with the gaming world, and it has noted that developers are running the gamut from purely optimising their games for Prism, to porting existing games to Arm, to coding entirely natively for the Arm ecosystem.
The company is also engaged with developers to ensure the ecosystem supports all the current anti-cheat software around, something that’s been a struggle for Linux gaming.
“We are working closely with game developers to ensure all the top games run great,” an Nvidia rep tells me. “Our ongoing collaborations are bringing Fortnite, VALORANT, League of Legends, PUBG and more to run on RTX Spark.
“One of the biggest challenges is native ARM anti-cheat that online games rely on. We are working with developers to bring support for major anti cheats like Easy Anti‑Cheat, BattlEye, and Denuvo among others. We’ll have even more game news to announce over the coming months.”
Here’s hoping Nvidia’s confidence in both the Prism emulation and the game developers proves warranted when the RTX Spark systems see the light of day towards the end of the year.
