Rui Carmo
After years of rumors, NVIDIA is finally shipping an Arm chip for Windows PCs, and the part that interests me isn’t the GPU–it’s the up to 128GB of unified LPDDR5x memory sitting behind it, something that Qualcomm never really went for.
The RTX Spark is essentially a consumer rebrand of the DGX Spark dev box (which I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to get my hands on, by the way), pairing a 20-core Grace CPU (co-designed with MediaTek, all big and “medium” cores, no efficiency cores) with up to 6,144 Blackwell cores, roughly a desktop RTX 5070’s worth of GPU inside an 80W envelope.
Might be a little toasty for a laptop, and will have to be very power efficient if they really want to compete with Apple Silicon… But there are zero actual specs anywhere on the PR, and pricing is sure to be… interesting.
But it’s nice to see them chasing the same unified-memory architecture that makes Apple’s M5 Pro/Max and the Framework Desktop genuinely useful for running local models, since 100GB+ of addressable VRAM is a lot more useful than the insulting 8-12GB you get on a discrete 5070.
And the gaming angle also makes it pretty interesting. Prism translation has finally gotten good enough that productivity work feels indistinguishable, but gaming remains a minefield of anti-cheat kernels that simply refuse to run. Qualcomm never “fixed” that (nor pricing, or efficiency either).
If it didn’t feel like the end times for computer hardware right now, this would be amazing.