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It finally happened: NVIDIA officially went public with its RTX Spark consumer processors to take on Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. I say "officially" because I've been hearing rumors about these ARM-based 'N1x' chips for over a year, but multiple announcements at this year's Computex show in Taiwan let the cat out of the bag.
Some of these mobile RTX SoCs are appearing in Windows on ARM laptops at the show, including Microsoft's uncompromising answer to Apple's MacBook Pro, the new flagship Surface Laptop Ultra. Predictably, PCs from other popular brands, like ASUS' 14-inch ProArt P14 and 16-inch P16, are targeting "all-day battery life" in the same way that PCs featuring Qualcomm's ARM-based Snapdragon X2 chips do.
In that, the mysterious hype from the past weekend around "a new era of PC" now feels more like a continuation of the Qualcomm-led ARM revival from 2024, which my Editor-in-Chief, Daniel Rubino, called a "great reset" for the industry. Then again, I wouldn't consider Microsoft's previous attempt at a "new era" of Copilot+ PCs a success, but it at least started a wave. And now, NVIDIA wants to ride that wave, bringing its specialized skills along.
My primary takeaway from NVIDIA's announcement was that it focused entirely on high-end laptops targeting "creators, AI developers, and gamers," at least for now. That's what separates it from what Qualcomm has been offering to more everyday consumers, with an exception for the ultra-high-end Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme processor featured in ASUS' phenomenal Zenbook A16.
So, if the RTX Spark processor can be "the most efficient PC chip ever built", as its marketing lead Mark Aevermann claims, does that include the integrated GPU performing better than anything else in its class? Can it come anywhere close to the desktop RTX 5070, given the matching CUDA core count, or is that a pipe dream reminiscent of the "4090 performance for $549" claims?
That kind of spec scrutiny will likely interest the die-hard enthusiasts and confuse the rest of us. Besides, I'll always take NVIDIA's mobile GPU pontification with a pinch of salt, as it casually oversells the capabilities of its laptop graphics by awarding them the same names as their full-size desktop counterparts. For example, a mobile RTX 5090 is about 50% slower than the desktop version.
Crucially, it hits me that we don't have any hints about fan noise or how long the RTX Spark-based laptop batteries will actually last in real-world testing, never mind what's touted on a spec sheet.
However, I'd generally prefer to remain optimistic, and the Snapdragon X devices that I've tested over the past couple of years certainly lived up to their claims. Either way, Microsoft benefits from the continued development of native ARM64 apps and whatever NVIDIA is doing to back up CEO Jensen Huang's claim that RTX Spark PCs will support "every single application that Windows has ever run."
Therefore, if NVIDIA can match everything Qualcomm has done to date and deliver more performant graphics, this could be a very exciting chapter for Windows on ARM. Although I won't call it "a new era," I'll still be watching the development of RTX Spark closely.
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