At Computex, Nvidia unveiled the RTX Spark platform, which is designed to reinvent the PC for the AI era.
For decades, the balance of power in the PC hardware market seemed set in stone—but that foundation is now potentially beginning to crumble.
In a keynote streamed live via YouTube from the Computex hardware trade show, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang presented the new “RTX Spark” platform, thereby launching a frontal assault on the market leaders Intel, Apple, and AMD.
Thanks to an alliance with ARM, MediaTek, and Microsoftthe AI company has developed a superchip designed to reimagine the personal computer for the age of AI in Nvidia’s vision.
The N1X chip: A challenge to Apple as well
The key to this is the heart of the new platform: the N1X superchip.
- Until now, Intel and AMD have dominated the inner workings of Windows PCs, while Nvidia focused on graphics cards.
- Together with chip specialist Mediatek, Nvidia has developed its own ARM-based 20-core CPU and fused it directly with a Blackwell graphics unit onto a single chip. This is said to offer up to 6,144 CUDA cores and 1 petaflop of AI performance.
- Added to this is 128 gigabytes of shared memory. The result is a system that is very reminiscent of Apple’s M-chips, but with additional AI performance from Nvidia and full integration into Microsoft’s Windows ecosystem.
However, while Windows has so far been designed almost exclusively for processors with x86 architecture, such as AMD’s Ryzen models or Intel’s Core CPUs, Nvidia’s superchip requires the ARM version of the operating system.
Nvidia describes the chip’s performance as follows:
With OptiX and DLSS, users can render extremely large 3D scenes up to 90 GB in size, edit 12K videos in 4:2:2 format with the NVIDIA Blackwell decoder, run large language models with 120 billion parameters and a context of 1 million tokens, and play AAA games at a resolution of 1440p and over 100 frames per second with ray tracing, DLSS, and Reflex.
Nvidia is more specific regarding support from PC manufacturers. For the launch of the new platform, virtually all major PC manufacturers, including Dell, Asus, and MSI, have corresponding devices in the works. According to Nvidia, the first devices are expected to hit store shelves as early as this fall.
More than “just” laptops: Strong focus on AI agents
Nvidia’s vision goes far beyond traditional laptops, as the platform is specifically designed for agent-based AI. Among other things, Huang presented tiny, fanless desktop PCs intended to run completely silently in the background around the clock.
They are intended to serve as smart command centers for the home or office, without the need for expensive AI cloud subscriptions.
The idea behind this:
- In the future, users will no longer have to click through countless menus in Word, Adobe Photoshop, or 3D programs themselves. Instead, an AI agent will run locally on the device.
- You give the agent a goal—such as designing a house based on a rough sketch—and the agent independently opens the necessary programs, generates models, and corrects its own errors.
- Humans will transition from operators to supervisors. Because these processes tolerate no delay, they must be computed locally—and that is precisely the hardware Nvidia now provides.
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The PC of the future, according to Huang, will feel less like a traditional work tool and more like an autonomous assistant that acts like the Star Wars droids R2-D2 or C3PO.
Independent performance tests and pricing are still pending, however. Another particularly intriguing question is how close the Windows experience with an ARM chip will come to the one we’ve all known for ages with x86 processors.
