Nvidia Challenges Apple Silicon With New RTX Spark PC Chip

[MacRumors]

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.

Article Link: Nvidia Challenges Apple Silicon With New RTX Spark PC Chip

 

[chrono1081]

Oh wow, finally some competition after....6(?) years?

 

[Shalev Lazarof]

yeah yeah, it's running windows.

 

[Justin Cymbal]

Well…..it’s a good thing John Ternus is about to step up to the plate 😎

 

[aaronage]

Strix Halo, RTX Spark... "Max" style SoCs are becoming the norm

A lot of people here once thought Apple couldn't compete in this space! Now they're setting the direction of the industry 🙂

 

[relaxedpanda]

Oh wow, finally some competition after....6(?) years?

You say this as if Apple didn't live for a decade in a shadow as the slow in comparison models to the PC market

 

[Nyx1]

Nice M6 will be crush them all can't wait for November event really hope one more thing like 5 years ago when Apple introduced Apple silicon moments

 

[AndyUnderscoreR]

"AI agents that can work proactively across apps and run in the background as a personal 'teammate.'"

What a revolting concept. Thanks for warning us, Nvidia PR.

 

[iPay]

Well, they mainly challenge Intel, and probably make sure to control all data fed to local or remote AI.

 

[arobert3434]

Interesting, but these two chips will never compete directly.

 

[iLuddite]

That Surface teaser video is peak…peak cringe.

 

[ph001bi]

All that so that people can leak outrageous Geekbench scores prior to the launch of each new chip, said scores disappearing as soon as the new chip has launched.

 

[arubinst]

Not interested in Windows. But this things could get interesting running Linux. Competition is good! The winner in the end is the consumer.

 

[tyranne201]

No thanks

 

[carswell]

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."

Freakin' AI is infecting everything. Yeah, it has its uses. But we don't need it taking over every aspect of our lives TYVM.

 

[JulianL]

This is all very well but this is going to stay at least somewhat niche and not make it to anything like widespread impact until another seismic shift happens in the marketplace - not progress but a seismic shift back to the past.

It's all very well talking about the capabilities to run these huge models but most consumers I suspect will never be willing to pay the current prices to upgrade their systems to 64GB let along 128GB of RAM. Most of the debate on these forums still seems to be about ranges from 16GB up to maybe 48GB and probably still a large percentage about the entry level - "will 16GB be enough or should I go for 24GB?".

If/when this RAM pricing craziness comes to an end and the affordable memory configurations for most regular users does break out of what I would say is currently 16GB to 32GB/36GB range then we probably will see some real impact as more and more people get access to much larger locally hosted models but until that happens then this sort of processor competition is interesting for the people already deep into the world of running very large models locally but for the rest of us it doesn't make that much difference (yet) because assuming we do have a fairly recent M-Series SoC we're probably primarily RAM-limited when it comes to running larger models.

 

[Le0M]

Computing per watt?
No words about that.

 

[pbau]

Good. Apple needs competition like this.
So many generations of Apple Silicon and still no gaming that could drive more users in.

They need to work on software now much more and keep up with the hardware too...

Competition is good for us

 

[Steve Adams]

Freakin' AI is infecting everything. Yeah, it has its uses. But we don't need it taking over every aspect of our lives TYVM.

I am not going to lie, the proart 14 and surface ultra have my attention, but if you cannot turn off the agentic stuff, I probably won't bite. Can I remove that version of windows and install basic as I am using now, I am in like flynn.

 

[chrono1081]

You say this as if Apple didn't live for a decade in a shadow as the slow in comparison models to the PC market

They didn’t. I literally have no clue where you even get that idea.

 

[pigeonguy]

Oh wow, finally some competition after....6(?) years?

Not really. Nvidia doesn’t know how to price products competitively. Their latest GPUs are insanely priced.

These devices will be very expensive and most people will be priced out of owning one.

 

[Chet-NYC]

Yeah yeah, it's running windows.

That will always be the Achilles Heel for any personal computer outside of a Mac (or Linux).

 

[chrono1081]

Not really. Nvidia doesn’t know how to price products competitively. Their latest GPUs are insanely priced.

These devices will be very expensive and most people will be priced out of owning one.

This is my guess. Just like the last major announcement that essentially doubled the price of the computer.

 

[paulvee]

"AI agents that can work proactively across apps and run in the background as a personal 'teammate.'"

What a revolting concept. Thanks for warning us, Nvidia PR.

That was my thought exactly.

 

[AndyUnderscoreR]

I am not going to lie, the proart 14 and surface ultra have my attention, but if you cannot turn off the agentic stuff, I probably won't bite. Can I remove that version of windows and install basic as I am using now, I am in like flynn.

If you're lucky they will have misunderstood consumer sentiment enough to offer a premium version of the chip without the slop section at a lower price.