Nvidia enters the PC chip race with RTX Spark, taking aim at Apple, Intel and Qualcomm

Nvidia has unveiled the RTX Spark, its first consumer-grade processor designed for Windows PCs, placing the graphics giant in direct competition with Apple, Intel and Qualcomm in the contested personal computing market. Announced at Nvidia GTC Taipei, the RTX Spark is a new superchip featuring 1 petaflop of AI performance, industry-leading power efficiency, full-stack Nvidia AI and graphics technology, and up to 128GB of unified memory.

The RTX Spark superchip features an Nvidia Blackwell RTX GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores and fifth-generation Tensor Cores with FP4 precision, connected via the Nvidia NVLink-C2C chip-to-chip interconnect to a high-performance, 20-core Nvidia Grace CPU.

The chip is designed to handle intensive workloads on-device. Users can render ultralarge 90GB 3D scenes, edit 12K 4:2:2 video, generate 4K AI videos, run 120-billion-parameter large language models with up to 1 million tokens of context using agents locally, and play AAA games at 1440p resolution at over 100 frames per second.

MediaTek, a market leader in Arm-based system-on-a-chip designs, collaborated with Nvidia on the custom CPU design, contributing to its power efficiency, performance and connectivity. The chip is manufactured on TSMC's 3nm fabrication node, according to reporting by CNBC.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang used the Computex keynote to assert the RTX Spark represents a fundamental shift in personal computing. "For forty years, you launched apps. Click. Type. With RTX Spark and Microsoft Windows, you ask — and the PC does the work. RTX Spark brings everything Nvidia has built — CUDA, RTX, our AI platform — into a single superchip. Local agents. Frontier models. Creative workflows. RTX games. All on a laptop. This is the new PC. The personal AI computer," Huang said.

Huang further described the shift as comparable in scale to the transformation of the mobile phone into the smartphone, pointing to agentic AI as the driver of change. He also noted that Nvidia had previously told CNBC that CPUs were "becoming the bottleneck" amid surging agentic AI workflows.

Nvidia and Microsoft are collaborating on the software layer underpinning the new platform. The partnership includes new Windows security primitives and the Nvidia OpenShell runtime, designed to ensure agents run securely and under full user control. OpenShell provides capabilities to route queries to local models based on user privacy policies and to obscure personal information before queries are sent to cloud models.

On the hardware side, Microsoft unveiled its own RTX Spark device. Surface Laptop Ultra is described as the most powerful Surface Laptop ever built, featuring an Nvidia Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 128GB of unified memory and full CUDA support, delivering 1 petaflop of AI compute capable of running up to 120-billion-parameter models locally. The device features a 15-inch mini-LED PixelSense Ultra touchscreen running up to 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness.

RTX Spark-powered slim laptops and compact desktop PCs will be available this autumn from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft Surface and MSI, with models from Acer and GIGABYTE to follow. Adobe also confirmed it is rebuilding Photoshop and Premiere for the platform, with the collaboration expected to deliver up to 2x faster AI, editing, colouring and effects performance across creative workflows.