It’s been one of the industry’s worst-kept secrets, but now it’s official: Nvidia is building its own laptop SoC, pairing a MediaTek Arm chiplet with an in-house GPU core. The top version of RTX Spark, codenamed N1X, packs up to 20 Grace CPU cores, 6144 Blackwell GPU cores and up to 128 GB of unified LPDDR5x memory.
But “up to” is doing a lot of the work here. This isn’t one chip, it’s a whole family ranging from 16 GB to 128 GB, according to Nvidia’s Mark Aevermann, who says the platform will hit “a lot of different price points.” Just as well, given that 128 GB of memory in today’s market would cost a small fortune.
On performance, Nvidia’s headline pitch is over 100 fps at 1440p with ray tracing and DLSS, though as VideoCardz notes, the company hasn’t published a game list, settings or power limits for that figure, and only pegs the GPU at roughly RTX 5070 Laptop level depending on the application. Take it as a ceiling under ideal conditions, not a guarantee.
Aevermann is talking about more than 30 laptops and around ten desktops to start with, plus mini PCs in the same vein as the Linux-based DGX Spark. Acer, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, MSI and Lenovo are all set to have systems ready. With power figures running from 80 W down to the “low single digits,” it’s not hard to imagine a future handheld either, even if Nvidia was clear it isn’t commenting on that form factor for now.
The hard part, as always with Arm, is software. Because RTX Spark is Arm silicon, plenty of x86 Windows games will lean on Microsoft’s Prism emulation layer unless a native Arm build exists. Nvidia says developers sit all across the scale, from optimising for Prism to porting to Arm to coding natively, and it’s working to bring Fortnite, VALORANT, League of Legends and PUBG to the platform.
The biggest question for the competitive scene is anti-cheat. Nvidia says it’s working with developers on Arm support for Easy Anti-Cheat, BattlEye and Denuvo, exactly the piece that has hampered Linux gaming for years. Pull it off, and the door opens for competitive titles on Arm laptops. Fail, and RTX Spark ends up mostly an AI and productivity machine with gaming ambitions, an angle Nvidia is hedging toward anyway with a reported Adobe partnership to rebuild Photoshop and Premiere for the chip.
We’ll know which side wins out by the end of the year, when the first systems are actually in people’s hands.
Published: Jun 1, 2026 05:33 am