Nvidia is entering the consumer PC chip business for the first time and has thrown down the gauntlet to Apple, describing its new RTX Spark processor as "the most efficient PC chip ever built."
Nvidia says its RTX Spark Superchip is purpose-built to run AI agents that can work proactively across apps and run in the background as a personal "teammate."
With the chip, Nvidia says users can "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."
The chip was announced by Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang at the Computex conference in Taipei on Monday.
It's a big play for a company traditionally focused on graphics cards to move into the kind of integrated silicon that runs an entire laptop. It also puts the RTX Spark on a collision course with Apple's M5, widely regarded as the laptop chip to beat for running AI tasks on-device.
Like Apple's chips, the RTX Spark is Arm-based, pairing an Nvidia Blackwell RTX graphics processor with a Grace CPU. It's effectively the same GB10 chip that's found in the DGX Spark, the tiny "personal AI supercomputer" that Nvidia released last year.
Microsoft's new 15-inch Surface Laptop Ultra will be among the first machines to ship with the integrated silicon. The machine features a mini-LED touchscreen, the largest haptic touchpad Microsoft has fitted to a Surface, and a selection of ports covering HDMI, USB-C, USB-A, SD cards, and headphones.
Configured with up to 128GB of unified memory, the Ultra can run AI models with up to 120 billion parameters locally, a figure Microsoft attributes to Nvidia, based on a theoretical performance measure. Microsoft claims it's the most powerful Surface it has ever built.
Nvidia says its chip will eventually appear in around 30 laptops and more than 10 desktops built by the likes of Asus, HP, MSI, Lenovo, and Dell.
Microsoft says the Surface Laptop Ultra will arrive later this year. Pricing has not been announced, but Nvidia has suggested the first wave of RTX Spark machines will target the premium end of the market.
