It was only a matter of time before NVIDIA released a powerful system-on-a-chip (SOC) to take on AMD’s Ryzen AI Max and Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X2 chips. At Computex today, NVIDIA unveiled the RTX Spark, a “superchip” meant to give both laptops and small desktops fast AI and graphics performance. You can think of it as a portable sibling to the company’s $3,999 DGX spark AI mini-desktop, except it’s built for Windows instead of Linux. RTX Spark will powering new laptops including the Surface Surface Laptop Ultra and Dell XPS 16, as well as systems from “every single major OEM,” according to NVIDIA.
NVIDIA isn’t diving deep into the technical aspects of the RTX Spark just yet, but the company says it offers 1 petaflop of AI computing power, and that it has 6,144 Blackwell RTX cores and 20 Mediatek Arm CPU cores. NVIDIA claims it’s similar to the RTX 5070 laptop GPU but with much lower power draw. RTX Spark also has an NPU that’s fast enough to be part of Microsoft’s Copilot+ initiative, which requires a 40 TOPS NPU, but NVIDIA says it’s mainly touting the tensor cores as part of the chip’s Blackwell GPU for AI performance.
RTX Spark’s GPU can directly draw the chip’s large pool of unified memory, which can span from 16GB to 128GB, and the chip itself can use anywhere from single-digit wattage up to 80W. And before you ask, no, there are no plans to offer the chip alongside dedicated GPUs.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang positions RTX Spark as a complete reinvention of the PC, eventually turning them more into devices meant for AI agents than manual human input. “Today, when you think about your phone, the one thing you don’t do with it is make phone calls,” Huang said on stage at Computex. “You do just about everything else. So that phone means something very different to you, than a phone of the past.”
NVIDIA has been working together with Microsoft for “several years” while designing the RTX Spark, according to NVIDIA representatives. That’s a sign that the company should be familiar with the Prism emulation layer for running older Windows apps on Arm-based chips. Reps also say that NVIDIA is working with “every” major anti-cheat provider for popular games, something that’s held back support for titles like Fortnite on the first batch of Snapdragon Copilot+ systems.
Microsoft
In a blog post provided to media, Microsoft head of Windows and devices, Pavan Davuluri, noted that the company optimized Windows 11’s workload profile scheduling for the RTX Spark. “Whether you’re checking your email or running an agent locally to debug code, the Windows scheduler on RTX Spark will ensure you get the best performance and efficiency out of your CPU,” he wrote.
While the DGX Spark desktop is mainly targeted at large companies and AI developers, the RTX Spark should be more accessible to content creators and people just getting into AI development. There was also plenty of hype around AI agents during NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s Computex keynote today.
I could see people who are already fully onboard with NVIDIA’s ecosystem on their desktops picking a slim RTX Spark laptop for gaming and AI computing on the go. We haven’t seen NVIDIA ship its own SOCs to consumers since the days of the Tegra, so it’ll be interesting to see how RTX Spark fares in today’s far more competitive computing market.
