Windows PCs may finally have a answer to Apple Silicon. NVIDIA and Microsoft are positioning RTX Spark, a new system-on-a-chip powering the Surface Laptop Ultra and several other Windows PCs this fall, as a way to reinvent the PC. It is the first time powerful Arm CPUs have been paired with NVIDIA's Blackwell GPU technology and up to 128GB of fast unified memory on a single chip.
In theory, RTX Spark should enable thin yet powerful laptops and small desktops that handle AI tasks locally, along with content creation and gaming. The chip is clearly a response to Apple Silicon, which brought similar Arm CPU, GPU and unified memory designs to Macs from the Mac mini to the Mac Studio and 16-inch MacBook Pro. With RTX Spark, high-end Windows users finally get the efficiency benefits of Arm-based chips, while recent Qualcomm chips cover the low-end and mid-range.
The RTX Spark SoC pairs up to 20 NVIDIA Grace Arm CPU cores with a Blackwell GPU offering up to 6,144 CUDA cores and up to 128GB of LPDDR5x memory. NVIDIA claims it is twice as efficient as a laptop with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H and RTX 5070 while gaming at 60 watts. Efficiency matters most for people who work on the go, since the chip can deliver similar performance on battery as on power.
The large memory pool should also appeal to AI developers and researchers who want to run large models locally, potentially reducing spending on cloud AI tokens. Both companies envision running AI models and agents directly on RTX Spark laptops, and even if that future is slow to arrive, the chip could still drive meaningful change in the PC market.
Source: Engadget · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing