Nvidia’s RTX Spark PCs launch in October with bold 100fps gaming promises
The RTX Spark N1X Arm chip, to be specific. It’s a 20-core design with an integrated “Blackwell RTX GPU” sporting 6,144 smaller cores, according to Nvidia’s promotional material, and it supports a maximum of 128GB of memory. That’ll be available for both laptops and mini PCs (“compact desktops”). A slightly less extreme version with 18/5,120 cores and a surprisingly spare 32GB memory maximum will be exclusive to laptops.
Hardware will be coming from the biggest names in the PC industry. Lenovo, Dell, HP, Asus, MSI, and Microsoft are all confirmed partners, though exactly when they’ll have products available—and what prices and form factors they’ll be available in—hasn’t been nailed down.
But the first ones will land in October. Nvidia confirmed at least one new RTX Spark-powered laptop from Lenovo, a variant of the Yoga 9 design christened the Yoga 9n 2-in-1. Lots of others were previewed at Computex, too, notably the Surface Ultra.
Nvidia
There’s at least one mini PC coming, presumably in October, from Acer. Since the mini PCs with Spark so far have been fully focused on “AI,” I wouldn’t hunt for anything particularly relevant to consumers in that area.
Arm chips aren’t really made for gaming, at least not PC gaming. You can find plenty of them powering other devices, including VR headsets, small emulation gaming gadgets from the likes of Anbernic and Retroid, both generations of the Nintendo Switch (which use Nvidia Arm designs). But Nvidia is hoping to change that more or less overnight. It claims that “the biggest game publishers are onboard” for the RTX Spark rollout, including EA, Ubisoft, Konami, Capcom, CD Projekt Red, and Xbox.
Presumably that means all of the publishers and developers under Microsoft’s massive and somewhat raggedy banner will at least be aware of RTX Spark and given resources to make their games compatible.
