Nvidia’s New RTX Spark Wants to Ignite a Fire Under Apple Silicon
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Nvidia has just announced its plan to enter the PC chip business for the first time. The company’s new RTX Spark processor may provide a genuine challenger to Apple silicon processors, as Nvidia says it is “the most efficient PC chip ever built.”
Nvidia says the new RTX Spark chip is purpose-designed for AI, content creation, and gaming. The company claims the RTX Spark brings together 30 years of NVIDIA innovation, using various company breakthroughs from over the years — including NVIDIA CUDA, NVIDIA RTX, DLSS, FP4, NVIDIA TensorRT, NVIDIA OptiX, Reflex, and G-SYNC — to power Windows laptops, providing all-day battery life and small, super-efficient desktop PCs.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang announced the new chip at the Computex conference in Taipei on Monday.
Releasing an integrated chip that runs an entire laptop is a big move for the company, as it has traditionally focused on the manufacture of graphics cards. The RTX Spark could allow PC makers to offer laptops that will be competitive with the MacBook lineup, which is powered by Apple’s M5 chips that have made Apple silicon the benchmark to beat when it comes to processing on-device AI tasks.
Like Apple’s A-series and M-series chips, the RTX Spark is Arm-based. The new chip lineup pairs an Nvidia Blackwell RTX graphics processor with a Grace CPU. The chip is the same GB10 chip that’s found in the DGX Spark, the tiny “personal AI supercomputer” that Nvidia released last year.
Nvidia says that users can expect to “render ultra-large 90GB 3D scenes with OptiX and DLSS, edit 12K 4:2:2 video with the NVIDIA Blackwell decoder, run 120-billion-parameter large language models with 1 million tokens context, and play AAA games at 1440p resolution and over 100 frames per second with ray tracing, DLSS and Reflex.”
Microsoft’s new 15-inch Surface Laptop Ultra, announced on Sunday, will be one of the first Windows laptops to ship with the RTX Spark. The new portable’s specs include “all-day battery life,” a 15-inch mini-LED PixelSense Ultra touchscreen that runs up to 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness, a large haptic touchpad, and a variety of available ports covering HDMI, USB-C, USB-A, an SD card slot, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
The new Surface Laptop Ultra can be configured with up to 128 GB of unified memory, which, based on Nvidia’s theoretical performance numbers for the RTX Spark, will allow it to run AI models with up to 120 billion parameters locally. Microsoft boasts that the new laptop is the most powerful Surface laptop it has ever produced.
Nvidia claims its new chip will appear in approximately 30 laptops and more than 10 desktop PCs, which will be offered by the usual suspects, including Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and MSI.
Microsoft says the Surface Laptop Ultra will arrive later this year. While pricing has yet to be announced, Nvidia indicated the first wave of RTX Spark machines will be targeted at the high end of the market. For more information about the Surface Laptop Ultra, visit the Microsoft website.
