At IFA today, NVIDIA confirmed that the upcoming N1X SoC for the RTX Spark PC platform will come in two configurations. The top-end model will feature a 20-core "Grace" CPU and a GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores based on the "Blackwell" microarchitecture. NVIDIA envisions this version for both laptops and mini PCs, offering between 24 GB and 128 GB of LPDDR5X unified memory.

The second configuration is slightly less powerful, with an 18-core "Grace" CPU, a "Blackwell" GPU with 5,120 CUDA cores, and 24-32 GB of LPDDR5X unified memory. This version is specifically aimed at laptops, which will be classified as Copilot+ AI PCs running Windows 11 for Arm. Both chips are officially called "N1X," and there is no "N1" as previously thought.

They are simply different configurations of the same chip, likely due to binning efforts during production. NVIDIA will launch these chips next month, and we expect to see systems from Acer, ASUS, Dell, MSI, HP, Microsoft, Lenovo, and many other OEMs. Pricing details are currently unknown, but with more memory, we can expect higher prices from any OEM, as memory is currently the most scarce resource. Microsoft has been preparing Windows 11 with a new feature called Intelligent Carveout.

This feature will allow the system to manage unified memory in SoCs like NVIDIA's upcoming RTX Spark, AMD Ryzen Halo, and other APU-like chips that integrate the CPU and GPU into a single package. These are connected to external LPDDR5X memory, which acts as a unified pool for both the CPU and GPU. With this new feature, we will see specialized controls that allow settings to be configured for independent partitions of this unified memory.