GoKawiilis a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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This fall, Nvidia will officially become a consumer PC chipmaker like Intel, AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm, putting a complete computing chip — not just graphics — into the very heart of laptops and mini-PCs. After many months of leaks, it’s finally announcing the RTX Spark, the first in a family of chips that will meet or beat the most powerful thin-and-light Windows machines ever, it claims.
“This is the most efficient PC chip ever built,” says Nvidia senior director of product management Mark Aevermann — without sharing so much as a single statistic or chart to back that up.
The RTX Spark is effectively the same GB10 chip that’s in the DGX Spark, the tiny “personal AI supercomputer” that Nvidia released last year, only now it’s a family of chips instead of just one. The flagship version appears to be spec-to-spec identical with 20 CPU cores, 6,144 GPU cores and 128GB of LPDDR5X memory.
Nvidia’s CEO holds up two RTX Spark laptops at Computex. Image: Nvidia
But Nvidia says there’ll be lesser versions later, targeting lower prices, and with as little as 16GB of RAM.
Like Apple and Qualcomm’s chips, this Nvidia chip is Arm-based silicon, meaning legacy Windows software made for Intel and AMD’s x86 processors needs to run through an emulation layer to work. That can mean lower performance. But Microsoft has now spent years getting Windows and its Prism emulator ready for Qualcomm and now Nvidia chips, and Nvidia claims its own graphics and AI chops will take the idea further than ever before.
If these specs sound familiar, it’s because they’re the same as the DGX Spark AI mini-PC. Image: Nvidia
With the power of the RTX Spark, Nvidia boasts, you can render a 90GB 3D scene, edit 12K resolution video, or play the graphically intensive Indiana Jones and the Great Circle at a smooth 100fps at 1440p resolution — all in a 14mm thick laptop without a power cord plugged in.
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