Nvidia, the major semiconductor company powering the ongoing AI boom with its graphics processing units (GPUs), has announced a new “superchip” for personal computers, as the hardware giant looks to directly take aim at the likes of Apple and Intel.
Nvidia has partnered with Microsoft to launch the new chip, called the Nvidia RTX Spark, and it will power computers made by the likes of Dell, Asus, and HP. With the new chip, Nvidia — known for its dominance in AI infrastructure so far – is pushing beyond its traditional graphics cards into integrated chips that power the whole PC.
The AI rush has made Nvidia unrivalled in the AI space because of its powerful GPUs – demand for which has skyrocketed – and has pushed once dominant companies like Intel to the fringes. Today, Nvidia is the biggest chipmaker in the world, with a market cap of over $5 trillion.
In 2020, Apple shook the world with its own line of chips with the launch of Apple Silicon, in a move which also saw it break away from its long-term partnership with Intel, which had supplied chips for its computers since 2005. Intel, the legacy chipmaker for personal computers, has meanwhile struggled to keep pace with the AI boom and has lost market share to the likes of AMD and Apple.
What is Nvidia’s RTX Spark?
The NVIDIA RTX Spark is a purpose-built superchip for Windows AI laptops and compact desktops. It fuses a 20-core Arm central processing unit (CPU) and a Blackwell RTX GPU (6,144 CUDA cores) via NVLink-C2C. It delivers 1 petaflop of AI performance and supports up to 128GB of unified memory, enabling it to run 120-billion parameter local AI models. The chip, built on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s (TSMC) 3-nanometre architecture is expected to power more than 30 laptops and 10 desktops.
The key pitch that Nvidia is making with the new chip is that it will power Windows PCs “purpose-built for personal agents”.
“The PC is being reinvented,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. “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.”
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Huang’s comment essentially suggests that AI agents, powered by the chip, could displace the mouse and keyboard as the primary way that people interact with their computers.
The RTX Spark superchip features an Nvidia Blackwell GPU, with a Grace CPU, which Nvidia has designed in collaboration with Taiwan’s MediaTek. The launch partnership with the likes of Dell, Asus, and HP is expected to place the processor in the hands of millions of users worldwide, as these companies account for over 70% of global PC shipments. Computers from Acer and Gigabyte will also soon launch with these new chips.
Nvidia said that laptops powered by the RTI Spark will boast “all-day battery life”, and added that Adobe was rearchitecting its Photoshop and Premiere software from the ground up for the chips to deliver twice as fast AI and graphics performance compared to current alternatives.
The new chip wars
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Intel dominated the computer chip market for several decades, but started losing ground to competitors like AMD, Nvidia, and Qualcomm as it failed to adapt to changing customer trends towards mobile and AI. Intel made chips that powered devices running both Microsoft and Macintosh, but was handed a major blow in 2020 when Apple announced its own line of semiconductor chips and announced it would phase out its Intel-powered computers.
Apple’s current generation of silicon, the M5 line, is widely considered to be the leading consumer laptop processor chip, equipped to run AI apps locally on a device. Apple has since cornered a nearly 15% market share in the PC market, which has come entirely at the expense of Intel.
Nvidia now poses a new threat to the fledgling chipmaker. Having already established itself as one of the most influential companies behind the AI boom through its expansive AI infrastructure across hardware and software, the semiconductor giant is now coming after Intel’s key business, Windows PCs, where it continues to hold a majority market share, especially at the budget end.
The wide consensus on Intel chips has been that they failed to pivot from its traditional CPUs to GPUs, bet on the wrong internal AI architectures, and ignored software ecosystems. These strategic missteps, paired with manufacturing delays, allowed Nvidia to capture a near-monopoly on AI hardware.
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Intel is working to launch its own AI chip that uses cheaper memory and cooling technology than rival offerings from Nvidia and AMD by the end of this year, the Financial Times had reported.