Nvidia enters laptop processor market as first RTX Spark machines go on sale
The first laptops built on Nvidia's RTX Spark chip went on sale worldwide on Friday. Early reviews praise its graphics performance but say its CPU cores lag the latest designs. Prices start at $2,599.
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Nvidia pushed into the Windows laptop processor market on Friday as its RTX Spark platform became available worldwide, the company said. The N1X chip pairs a MediaTek-designed Arm CPU with up to 20 cores and a Blackwell GPU with up to 6,144 CUDA cores, both built by TSMC on a 3-nanometer process, according to Tech Times. The machines run Windows 11 on Arm with up to 128 GB of memory.
Microsoft (Surface Laptop Ultra), Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and MSI are offering RTX Spark laptops. U.S. prices start at $2,599, with Dell's XPS 16 starting at $3,799; HP models ship Nov. 4, Windows Central reported.
In early reviews compiled by Tech Times, the chip scored 6,060 in the 3DMark Time Spy Extreme graphics benchmark, ahead of AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 395 at 4,689, while its single-core CPU performance trailed Apple's M5 Pro. HotHardware measured 14 hours and 35 minutes of video playback on the Surface Laptop Ultra. Lower-power, cheaper variants are in development, the report said.