Nvidia unveils ARM processor N1X alias RTX Spark for Windows notebooks

In his keynote, Huang announced that numerous manufacturers are working on notebooks with the N1X or RTX Spark. These include Acer, Asus with the ProArt P14 and P16 series, Dell with the XPS line, Lenovo with Legion, IdeaPad, and Yoga, Microsoft with a Surface Laptop Ultra, and MSI. Huang named Fall 2026 as the official launch date; some manufacturers are more specifically anticipating September or October.

Roadmap: Vera Rubin Spark and Rosa Feynman Spark

Together with Satya Nadella, Huang is also expected to appear at the Build 2026 developer conference, which begins on June 2. Further details on software integration and the collaboration between the two companies are likely to be announced there.

Nvidia also presented an updated roadmap for future consumer SoCs at Computex. According to this, the Spark chip will be available in two variants: The Blackwell version will also be available in a smaller configuration, roughly equivalent in performance to an RTX 5050. For the future, Nvidia continues to rely on standardized ARM cores rather than in-house developments.

The roadmap also provides for future Spark generations to be equipped with the Rubin and Feynman GPU architectures. The corresponding SoCs will be named Vera Rubin Spark and Rosa Feynman Spark. Vera Rubin Spark is scheduled for 2028 and will utilize faster LPDDR6 RAM. Rosa Feynman Spark is planned for two years later; Nvidia has not yet provided technical details for it.

However, Nvidia's development focus remains on data centers. Consumer SoCs will therefore be released approximately one year later than their corresponding data center products. The DGX Station, equipped with a CPU and GPU developed for data centers, will also receive modernized successors. The current Blackwell-based model will be usable under Windows from the fourth quarter of 2026.

Competition in the ARM Market

In his keynote, Huang also introduced the Vera CPU separately. It is designed for high throughput, achieved through a wide frontend architecture, fast memory, and high internal bandwidth. For this purpose, all CPU cores are integrated onto a single silicon die.

With the RTX Spark, Nvidia is making its first major foray into the consumer SoC market, thus entering into direct competition with Qualcomm, Apple, Intel, and AMD. Industry observers see this as a significant step for the ARM-based Windows platform, which has so far been dominated primarily by Qualcomm.

The market for ARM notebooks has been growing steadily since the introduction of Apple's M-series. Microsoft and other manufacturers are trying to achieve a similar combination of performance and energy efficiency with Windows-on-ARM devices. Nvidia's entry with a powerful integrated GPU could provide new momentum to this segment.