GoKawiilRegardless of your opinion of Nvidia’s RTX Spark, there’s no doubt that it’s the most consequential consumer announcement to come out of Computex 2026. Unlike Intel, which told Tom’s Hardware it’s handling the launch with “a healthy dose of paranoia,” AMD’s executives are confident that its Strix Halo and upcoming Gorgon Halo products will compete well with the N1X and N1 under the RTX Spark brand.
“I’m really excited that Nvidia has joined the game. You know, we were the only game in town for almost two years now, and the large local memory is becoming super critical in the agentic AI [workloads],” said AMD’s Rahul Tikoo, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s client business. “I'm actually happy to see Nvidia join the race for these great products.”
AMD, of course, believes that Strix Halo and eventually Gorgon Halo are positioned well against RTX Spark devices. In a separate discussion, AMD’s Andrej Zdravkovic, chief software officer, said, “At this point in time… I mean, you’re just wrong if you don’t get a Strix Halo notebook,” when speaking on the choice of machine for developers. As the software lead at AMD, however, Zdravkovic is distanced from the hardware. Tikoo had more direct comments on the hardware comparison.
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“I’m actually curious about what [Nvidia has] done, but when I look at their specs, their specs are 128 gigs of local memory. We’ve done it on Strix Halo. Their specs are a 20-core CPU. We have a 16-core / 32-thread CPU in here,” Tikoo said. “So, if you just compare the specs, I don’t see… now, Gorgon Halo, which is coming out in Q3, is going to be a better product.”
Hardware is only one part of the battle, which has become clear as AMD continues to push its way into AI infrastructure. Tom’s Hardware asked Zdravkovic about the so-called ‘CUDA moat’ that Nvidia has built for itself, and how AMD plans to address that as it rolls out updates for its own ROCm stack.
“If you asked me the same question like three years ago, I would be, yeah, that really matters. I think that matters less at this point,” Zdravkovic told Tom’s Hardware. “Nvidia has created a phenomenal ecosystem around CUDA, and our advantage is that ROCm is, from a developer point of view, extremely easy to use… the shift from one to another is easy, and the only challenge is if your application ends up using some of the specific commands that Nvidia has and we don’t, and the other way around.”
The posturing against Nvidia is expected, both on the hardware and software side, but Tikoo also pointed out that Nvidia’s entrance into the consumer PC market has downstream benefits for AMD.
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“Nvidia has brought validity into the space… I think it’s also going to help the ecosystem move forward faster, right, because Nvidia and [AMD] are the two big players in this space, and both of us now being in this space not only drives the cloud ecosystem, it drives the AI ecosystem in the PC on Windows, and so we’re excited about that,” Tikoo said.
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