For decades, Nvidia has made the graphics card inside your Windows laptop, not the chip that runs it. Intel and AMD have mainly owned that part of the industry. But that changed at the Computex trade show in Taipei on June 1, where Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the RTX Spark, the company's first processor designed to be the main brain of a Windows PC.
Nvidia, currently the world's most valuable company with a market cap above $5 trillion, built the chip in close partnership with Microsoft. Devices from Microsoft Surface, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and MSI will carry it when they arrive this fall, with Acer and Gigabyte to follow.
"This reinvention of the computer is as big of a deal as the reinvention of the phone into what we now know as the smartphone," Huang told the audience in Taipei. "This is the first completely re-engineered, reinvented line of PCs that has happened in 40 years."
Tom's Guide, covering the keynote live, compared it to Apple's M1 moment in 2020, when Apple broke from Intel with its own custom chip and reshaped the entire laptop market.
Damilare Odedina
What the RTX Spark chip actually does
RTX Spark fuses two processors into one package. One handles everyday computing, using a new custom 20-core processor called the N1X, developed alongside Taiwan's MediaTek. The other handles graphics and AI, using Nvidia's latest Blackwell GPU with 6,144 graphics cores. Both share a single pool of up to 128 gigabytes of memory, built on TSMC's 3-nanometer process.
That is to say that the chip delivers 1 petaflop of AI compute, enough to run a 120-billion-parameter AI model, the same scale as some of today's largest AI systems, entirely on your laptop with no internet connection and no data leaving your device.
It also handles 12K video editing, large 3D scene rendering, 4K AI video generation, and AAA gaming above 100 frames per second at 1440p resolution, all in a laptop as thin as 14 millimetres. Nvidia's spokesperson described the graphics performance to CNBC as roughly equivalent to the company's standalone RTX 5070 laptop GPU.
What RTX Spark means for Photoshop, Premiere, and Windows creative tools
Adobe confirmed it is rebuilding Photoshop and Premiere from the ground up specifically for RTX Spark, with Nvidia promising up to 2x faster AI, editing, colour grading, and effects in both apps.
"The expansion of our partnership with NVIDIA and Microsoft will make those experiences faster and more powerful than ever," said Shantanu Narayen, chair and CEO of Adobe. Microsoft's Satya Nadella called RTX Spark "a real breakthrough" toward putting AI on every Windows device.
The confirmed first-wave devices are the Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra, Dell XPS 16 Creator Edition, ASUS ProArt P14 and P16, HP OmniBook X 14 and OmniBook Ultra 16, Lenovo Yoga Pro 9n, and MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI. No pricing has been confirmed by any manufacturer.
Nvidia's stock dropped 1.45% on the day despite the announcement, after the US Department of Commerce separately closed a loophole on May 31 that had allowed advanced Nvidia AI chips to reach Chinese firms through subsidiaries in Malaysia.
Jensen Huang is also appearing at Microsoft Build on June 2 and 3, where Microsoft is set to detail the Windows agent capabilities that run on RTX Spark, including new security features and the NVIDIA OpenShell framework for developers.
Emmanuel Umahi
