Lots of comments are expressing skepticism about compatibility but it's pretty cool how Nvidia has the clout to convince a bunch of game publishers and creative apps to release Arm versions. Popular games like League of Legends as well as stuff like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere are getting native Arm ports.

> Over 100 Windows software providers such as Adobe, Blackmagic Design, Blender, CapCut, ComfyUI and OTOY, and game developers such as KRAFTON, NetEase, Remedy Entertainment, Riot Games and XBOX are embracing the new RTX Spark platform. [...] NVIDIA is partnering with Adobe to rearchitect Adobe Premiere and Photoshop for RTX Spark. [0]

> Gaming on Arm is finally coming of age thanks to the NVIDIA partnership. Native anti-cheat solutions from Epic and BattlEye are fully supported on the RTX Spark platform. Major developers are jumping on board, with Riot Games bringing League of Legends and Valorant natively to the architecture, alongside KRAFTON bringing PUBG Battlegrounds. [1]

Also, Nintento Switch is an Nvidia/Arm gaming device so many game publishers already have some experience with the combo.

[0] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-microsoft-windows-...

[1] https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/01/microsoft-builds-it...

Some competition for Apple in this space and competition for Intel and AMD is great.

But I really do question how well Windows on Arm is really going to work out long term.

For Apple it worked because they were able to force the issue. If you wanted a new Mac it was going to be Arm and we all knew eventually (this year or is it next year?) Intel support would drop. Over time we have seen M series exclusive features.

Developers were forced to update or abandon Mac which gave users a great experience (with some early growing pains).

This is something that Windows will never be able too do. They will always be stuck maintaining an emulator and a likely large subset of apps only supporting one over the other. (also does this work the other way around with an Arm only app working on x86?)

This seems like a repeat of when it was not uncommon for games to only support Intel or AMD or NVIDIA or AMD. But worse since they are not both x86. Sure at least we have emulation but just like with Rosetta2 it shouldn't ever be the long term solution.

I didn't see this in the article but elsewhere I've seen the memory bandwidth quoted as 600GB/s [1]. For comparison:

- 5090/6000 Pro: 1792GB/s

- 5080:: 960GB/s

- 5070Ti: 892GB/s

- M3 Ultra: 819GB/s

- DGX Spark: 273GB/s (less than an M5 Pro at 307GB/s)

Memory bandwidth isn't everything but it will cap inference rate pretty heavily. Also, the M3 Ultra is for an almost 2 year old Mac Studio. It's widely expected that it'll be refreshed in Q3 with a likely M5 or M4 Ultra with >1000GB/s. I really hope Apple realizes what a market opportunity Apple has here.

The above shows just how good value the 5090 really is. It basically a RTX 6000 Pro with less RAM (and ~12% fewer CUDA units), which is a ~$10k card, for 20-30% of the price. This also demonstrates how NVidia uses VRAM for market segmentation. As an aside, the true data center cards (eg B100, H100) use HBM memory at ~3.2TB/s.

[1]: https://wccftech.com/nvidia-enters-pc-space-with-rtx-spark/

I added an R9700 32GB to my 10+ year old desktop that had a 980 4GB card in it, for a grand total of $1350 or so. The payoff compared to what I was using with GHCP was 33 months, but when GHCP announced their price increase, it basically became a 3 month payoff at minimum (so yes, GHCP did a 10x price increase for non-parallel agentic workflows)

I can easily run Qwen3.6 35B-A3B with Q5_K_M with a 260k+ context window with some vram to spare. It easily runs probably 80tps. It took me quite a while to find the

Compared to GHCP Claude Sonnet 4.5 or 4.6, I have full parity. The wall clock time is faster for agentic workflows, and rule following is about on par.

With either, doing something kind of novel or obscure takes more hand holding compared to just generate a GUI or crud app. For example, trying to build an actual program that performs a complicated process correctly requires quite a bit of hand holding to get it to properly help.

Sure, it isn't Opus or something, but I think with the right harness, it probably can get close. I think most of the issues these days is the harnesses are lacking.

Can it work with Linux? That's all I care about.

I am wary of those ARM-based Windows machines because I am unsure how good the ongoing driver support for those SoCs will be. Will they even outlive the Windows version they currently ship with?

Looking at devices like the NVIDIA Shield gives me some hope that NVIDIA will be better than Qualcomm here. I just hope this is not a case where the OEM has to purchase X years of driver support from the chip vendor beforehand, and that NVIDIA will provide support directly itself.

I'm surprised they released this thing. Brand perception is probably a lot more important to Nvidia than whatever sales they could get from this thing, and if it's basically just DGX Spark, it's likely to underwhelm.

I've heard there's still a large backlog of both software problems, and hardware problems with the platform. The software problems could be fixed with time, but they'll still give a shitty first impression. I'd have thought Nvidia would just bury this and try again with a successor run of silicon with a new design.

This thing seems practically destined to just be a repeat of the Snapdragon laptop debacle.

Kinda underwhelming. I was hoping to see that they improved their memory bandwidth to move toward competing with the M5 Max. But this is more akin to the Strix Halo.

There are still a *lot* of sharp edges with the Spark: compatibility, overstated performance, power consumption/heat generation, etc. It's one thing to have that situation on a box explicitly aimed at developers and quite another with an actual consumer-focused laptop.

Looks like just rebranded DGX in laptop form, the biggest miss is the weak memory speed, 1/2 of the M5 laptop memory speed, and 1/3 of the M3 ultra that is now years old...

I think this is the first time an ARM windows device gets marketed for gaming. Would be interesting to see what kind of performance hit games have on the x86 to ARM translation layer.

For anyone curious to know how this will fare against Macbooks, at least in CPU perf: DGX Spark has the exact same GPU and CPU as the top RTX Spark laptops will, so you can just directly compare from that.

Of course, DGX Spark is a miniPC, so laptops will likely be slower due to power limits/throttling.

So they have basically reused the same hardware as in the DGX Spark (GB10)... That chip isn't great for LLM inference actually.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/gb10.c4342 https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/products/rtx-spark/

It's been almost 30 years, and a single letter changed. When will we get the Sparkstation, the UltraSpark and the SuperSpark?

Awesome, won't be buying it all at current prices but once they calm down, I will very much like to get one.

Around 2-3K USD something with a good GPU + CPU + 128GB of integrated RAM is just going to be an awesome experience.

Considering Mac options are north of 5K+ even on a regular day.

We'll need to wait for the benchmarks, but this looks great! Windows 11 ARM64 is already amazing, and if these really are an upgrade from the Qualcomm chips we're going to have even better laptops on the market.

The GB10 itself is pretty good and I love using mine for broad Linux development. But it's too expensive for consumer level pricing, and even for the "prosumer" the price is pretty stiff. Even if they dropped the CX-7 and halfed the RAM and shipped a smaller hard drive, would it be below, say, $2500 USD? I guess we'll see, but this variant is coming out pretty late so maybe it's just best to wait for the 2nd generation.

This seems to be an attempt to compete with people running local models on Apple hardware—even though those local Mac Mini setups aren't really powerful.

I expect we'll get there in a few years, so perhaps this is Nvidia taking an early step in that direction.

In that case, this goes against Anthropic and OpenAI's business models. Which is a double whammy after Jensen Huang's recent comment about how agentic coding will only increase demand for software engineers, not reduce it.

So it also feels like a part of a budding shift in the competitive tension between the various parts of the AI supply chain.

Love seeing AMD forcing Novideo to catch up for once rather than the other way around.

Is this just dgx spark, but a laptop?

Oh, btw, we are only making 10 of these, the rest of our capacity has been sold off to the large AI firms.

given how dgx spark was more advertised for finetuning ("tinkering") instead of inference, it is quite interesting to see their approach for the laptops to now be more inference-based.

knowing nvidia and their approach to consumer hardware (especially those on notebooks), i'd take a heavy grain of salt on getting a good deal.

also, they've been bad to their ecosystem partners, but now they've been able to boss them around into supporting them so far. i suppose getting anticheat vendors to finally support arm might be enough of a nudge for linux support? one can only dream

Will NVIDIA get a monopoly on providing laptops and desktops with a lot of RAM going forward?

The fact they advertise it as some step forward in PCs is outright bizzare.

It's just worse Strix Halo, as you are landing square in middle of Windows ARM problems

First:

> "Our goal is to deliver unmetered intelligence to every home and every desk with Windows," said Satya Nadella, chairman and head of Microsoft.

Then:

> However, Ian Fogg, Research Director at industry analyst firm FDM CCS Insight said the change was "likely to come with a significant price tag" and Nvidia would be targeting "those looking for workstation-class performance".

So... not every desk with Windows.

Related:

A powerful new chapter for Windows PCs, accelerated by Nvidia RTX Spark

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352693

Surface Laptop Ultra: Made for World Makers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352627

It was wintel (windows + intel) before. This will be what? Windia? Wintek?

They made their own x86 CPU? Or was that part outsourced? Ok ARM MediaTek.

competitor is already on the market and is x86: AMD AI 395+

bechmarks with DGX arnt spectacular for NVIDIAs software and CUDA lead.

wouldnt count on this being a price/compute challenger. especially with overpriced VRAM.

The thing I think is really funny is that if this takes off, frontier model companies and datacenters will end up holding the bag, and as per usual after the last few tech hype cycles, NVIDIA will still be selling.

Eventually a lot of inference will get right-sized into something you affordably run yourself.

I might be in a niche user, but what I a mostly looking forward into an ARM laptop, would be to be silent with preferably passive heat management or as little at possible active heat management (all day battery usage is a given).

Some other relevant discussions and sources …

NVIDIA and Microsoft Reinvent Windows PCs for the Age of Personal AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352705

NVIDIA DGX Station for Windows Puts a Trillion-Parameter AI Supercomputer on Every Enterprise Desk

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352691

Introducing Surface Laptop Ultra: Made for world makers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352627

Introducing a powerful new chapter for Windows PCs, accelerated by NVIDIA RTX Spark

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352693

128GB unified pool is the headline, but memory bandwidth is the number that decides local LLM speed

They show premium skinny laptops which will have this. I wonder how much the lack of heat dissipation capability will limit it's compute capabilities?

In university a friend of mine had a large hardcover book she kept in her dorm freezer. I asked here WTF she had a big book in there. She said it was for minecraft - she'd place her laptop on top of it while playing. The book was cold but also quite dry. I wonder how well it worked.

Looks like the MSI one might be a 2-in-1, if it has good stylus support I might have a good candidate for an upgrade, thought my ~3-4 year old Galaxy Book is holding up alright for now.

I’m getting more and more convinced that we will end up running LLMs in our personal computers. Which makes me wonder where Anthropic/OpenAIs moats will come from.

I really hope these take off and succeed and they support Linux. Qualcomm is seriously holding back the Linux ARM adoption with their continuous missteps.

It all sounds good on paper. But I have trouble believing Windows can be a good platform for this. Microsoft has lost all trust after inserting ads into windows, slowly removing power user features, and exploiting every dark pattern they can. And for years, the ARM based Windows laptops have been useless due to app compatibility issues. Why would this change now? Is it priced to be a lot cheaper than Apple’s laptops? Or is this a niche product for AI developers basically?

hope nvidia support driver better than qualcomm. also hope they support linux soon.

Looks like RTX Spark desktop is the DGX Spark desktop, minus the expensive 200GbE Connect-X NIC. Only since the DGX Spark released, memory and nand prices have jumped, so it will likely retail for the same amount as the DGX Spark did on release (which has since gone up significantly).

Is this finally Macbook Chip Efficiency coming to Windows or will it just be shittier compatibility for slightly better battery life?

With 128GB ram, the price tag would be pretty high. And lots of application does not work Windows on Arm. Even Microsoft provides something like Rosetta 2 for windows, still x86 architecture would be the most popular one for Windows for a looong time.

Saying that I think this is product is kinda dead on arrival.

Well, it was only a matter of time, since both AMD and now Intel are now switching to APUs. Nvidia could either cede the desktop GPU market to them, going all-in into AI datacenter chips, or it could challenge them.

Maybe the Nth time's the charm and Microsoft+Nvidia will manage to make Windows on ARM a viable platform.

Single-core CPU performance is going to be fully 20% slower than Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme. People are sleeping on Qualcomm's latest. It's the only chip out there to approach Apple's single core CPU performance and power efficiency.

Running local agents 24/7, I get that it's a powerful CPU or GPU or whatever it is, but still, isn't it going to be constantly loud and 95C hot, that can't be good for the laptop if it's like that 24/7

ARM64+GPU sure seems like the future. I'm still using my M1 and even that can handle models well, has decent graphics, M5 is a beast, and M6 must surely go even bigger on LLM compute. Now Microsoft has a compelling ARM64+GPU future too.

What does AMD or Intel have here?

"Notify me" -> i.e. when we finally have the DRAM to build this SoC.

What are these things going to cost? I hope not the same as a mac equivalent or as much as a dgx.

Geekbench cpu bench leaks indicate they aren’t as good as m3 at single core even.

Will they support booting into a Linux installer?

Unified RAM means its soldered to the mainboard, right?

I'm not sure if I like this. Sure for a laptop this might be not a big problem but if this ARM ecosystem is a success it will spread to desktop computers and I fear we could lose the existing modularity.

I have no idea how powerful or power efficient these guys are, but this seems to be the first step in a bigger push towards Windows on ARM (without loosing gaming).

I think more announcements will follow soon from other companies.

No thunderbolt is a big no for me. Its one of the greatest feature of MacbookPro that makes it dockable and expandable as a desktop with a good thunderbolt dock.

Wow, specs seem amazing. So want one of those once you can run linux on it, especially for the ability to run local models on a laptop.

can it run linux as I am not a windows nor a macos user

Pretty low bandwidth and given how terrible nvidias software has been with the DXG et el, I would not put much faith into this.

I really like this, but I think the reason Apple Silicon took off was that Apple sort of forced devs to support ARM. Not sure if Microsoft can do the same for Windows…

Nintendo Switch 3 will probably use this.

It’s a step in the right direction, but there’s still a long ways to go in terms of smaller LLMs ability and hardware costs

What is this product anyway? Is it a general purpose CPU or is it specifically designed for MS Windows? Nvidia stepping back from the open source?

"Introducing the NVIDIA RTX Spark™ Superchip. The fusion of NVIDIA AI and RTX graphics in a single chip redefines Windows PCs and delivers amazing creating, AI development, and gaming—on the slimmest, most beautiful RTX laptops ever and small, ultra-efficient desktops."

Great! More pressure on fabs, price of standard GPU will again rise.

Guess I need to postpone my gamer PC renewal to end 2030.

I've been daily driving a dgx spark. Once you start there is no going back.

NVIDIA nailed it

How would these compare to a MacBook Pro M5 in terms of performance and price?

can these do training or only inference? currently working on learning machine learning and I'd love to have a physical machine I could aim to build real workloads on in a few years.

I'm waiting for powerful on device LLM models, since that not worth it

Very exciting! sounds like we're finally leaving x86 behind

Anything they can do to avoid producing more 5090 FEs.

After nvidia's many years of neglecting Linux, paired with direct Microsoft's involvement? Are we going to trust them, to allow installing Linux in these easily?

I don't think so.

This most likely be a winmodem situation, again

undefined

"The performance is off the chart!" <basic chart is displayed to illustrate(?) the point>

More seriously, obviously a ton of work in an incredibly competitive space, and an incredible machine (without getting into competitive comparisons/minutiae). Was watching a techtechpotato[0] quick post pre-launch about "why is this even being tried?", which was also interesting. What an age we live in.

[0] https://youtu.be/JdB722MK380?si=GnLAYqT9ZecMhWCS

Yeaaaah . But at what Cost though.

Jensen Huang delivers the absolute worst keynotes - I wasnt ready for that level of cringe and stupidity.

how will this compare to having an rtx pro 6000 for inference? (not training)

Yeah, there is zero chance I'm ever running Windows ROFL.

However, I'd jump from Mac in a Heartbeat if this supported Linux.

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Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these. /slashdot

This may finally be the chip family ARM on Windows has always needed. Qualcomm's chips have always been dogs with slow off-the-shelf ARM CPU cores that have pathetic single-threaded performance compared to x86 AMD/Intel or ARM Apple Silicon designs.

So basically Cerebras style?

Question is: "Can it run Doom?"

"Unified Memory" still means divided address space right? You have to pre-allocate system vs gpu and copy from one to the other?

This will crush the M5 Max going by the numbers. I'm curious to see how much they end up costing

>Lenovo, HP, Dell and Apple accounted for almost 75% of the world's PC market in the first three months of this year, according to research firm Gartner.

https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-4-10...