The last few years have seen some notable shakeups in the PC industry, and the hits just keep coming. Nvidia is making its foray into PCs on the CPU side now, after being a GPU titan for years.
The company announced its RTX Spark processor at Computex in Taipei, Taiwan, on Monday, with — unsurprisingly — a major focus on AI. Nvidia called Spark the “most efficient PC chip ever built” and claims it can render massive 3D scenes, edit 12K video, run huge large language models (LLMs) locally, and play AAA games at 1440p resolution at over 100fps with ray-tracing. Though notably that last one includes using DLSS, presumably for upscaling, so not running at true 1440p. Still, the claims are impressive.
The AI focus also puts Spark in direct competition with Apple’s powerful new M5 chips, which are considered among the best for running AI locally.
Like Apple’s M-series, Spark is ARM-based, which bodes well for efficiency. Plus, we already know ARM chips can ramp up the performance, so I think Spark will be solid overall. I am curious to see how Spark handles gaming though, given PC games traditionally are mode to run on x86 chips, but so far the evidence indicates most games will run, albeit with some hiccups.
Nvidia’ top-line Spark chip will boast 20 CPU cores, 6,144 GPU cores, and 128GB of RAM. There will be other configurations with as little as 16GB of RAM later.
Alongside the Spark announcement, several PC makers unveiled their upcoming laptops that will feature Nvidia’s new chip. That includes Microsoft’s own Surface line, with the new Surface Laptop Ultra, the Asus ProArt P14 and P16, MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI Plus, and several more from the likes of Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others.
Overall, it looks like an exciting year for PC enthusiasts. The space has become quite interesting now, with first Qualcomm and now Nvidia breaking into a space that was mostly controlled by Intel and AMD. It’s good news overall, with Intel and AMD both rushing to improve their chips to contend with the influx of powerful and efficient new CPUs. Now we just need more RAM makers to help ease price pressure.
Header image credit: Nvidia
