Source: The Register
Article note: It's... essentially the Mediatec co-developed ARM SoC from the DGX Spark, repackaged for another round of LLM-generated hype and hard-sell.
People will tolerate substantially more software platform jank in a "supercomputing" product than in a laptop, and from what I hear the DGX Spark is pushing it for either category.
COMPUTEX 2026: It only took a year and a half but the same silicon at the heart of Nvidia's DGX Spark AI workstations will soon be powering Windows PCs. During his GTC Taiwan keynote on Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed the N1X, a high-end mobile processor that combines an Arm-based CPU co-designed with MediaTek with a Blackwell based GPU on board. Marketed under the “RTX Spark” banner, Nvidia’s new notebooks and mini PCs signal a deeper push into the a PC arena long dominated by Intel and AMD. But while the PCs are new, the chip powering them isn’t. Nvidia was rumored to be working on the N1X for several years now. At CES in 2025 the GPU slinger fanned the rumor mill flames when it unveiled the DGX Spark — then codenamed Project Digits. The $4,000 AI workstation was powered by a miniaturized Grace Blackwell processor packing 20 ARMv9 CPU cores and a Blackwell GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, capable of up to 500 teraFLOPS of FP4 compute — or 1 petaFLOP if you happen to have a workload that supports sparsity. That’s fed by 128 GB of unified memory. If that sounds familiar, that’s because the N1X and GB10 are essentially the same chip. The liberal use of the term “up to” in Nvidia’s marketing does, however, suggest that not all SKUs will have all CPU or GPU cores enabled. The silicon may be the same but the operating system isn’t. While Nvidia’s DGX Spark and GB10 partner systems shipped with DGX OS, a lightly customized version of Ubuntu 24.04, RTX Spark systems will ship with Windows. This opens the door to high performance mobile gaming using integrated Nvidia graphics. The GPU giant claims the N1X-based systems should be able to manage 100 frames per second at 1440P in AAA games, presumably with the help of AI upscaling tech like DLSS. With up to 128 GB of unified memory shared between the CPU and GPU, RTX Spark systems should be able to handle creative workloads previously limited to high-end workstations. Nvidia suggests top end RTX Spark systems should be able to handle 3D renders requiring 90-plus gigabytes of memory, edit 12K video, generate AI videos, and run 120 billion parameter LLMs with the large context windows required for local agents. As part of the announcement, Huang teased an appearance alongside Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to discuss the future of AI PCs during the software titan’s Build conference, which kicks off tomorrow. As for the hardware, Nvidia has clearly set a high bar for quality. In addition to DGX Spark-style Mini PCs, RTX Spark systems will range from 14 to 16-inches in size, feature aluminum chassis, and color accurate OLED displays with Nvidia G-Sync. The first N1X-based PCs and notebooks from the likes of Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI are expected to begin rolling out this fall. We’ve asked Nvidia to confirm RTX Spark systems pricing, but don’t expect the top end variants to be cheap. GB10-based systems ranged from $3,000 to $4,000 at launch. Memory prices have only gone up since then with the DGX Spark now retailing for $4,699. ®
