Nvidia yesterday announced at IFA in Berlin that the first RTX Spark Windows PCs arrive in October. It also set out how the chip inside those machines is being divided.
The company says there are two configurations, and both are the N1X:
- A 20-core Grace CPU with a Blackwell GPU of 6,144 CUDA cores and 24GB to 128GB of unified memory. This one goes into laptops and into compact desktops.
- An 18-core CPU with a Blackwell GPU of 5,120 CUDA cores and either 24GB or 32GB of memory. This one is for laptops only.
For over a year the leaks described two separate chips built with MediaTek, a large N1X and a smaller N1, and said the pair would arrive together. What ships next month is one chip cut twice. Nvidia says lower-specified versions will come later and has not given a date for them. Both core counts turned up in Nvidia’s Windows 11 driver package, version 616.00, back in July.
What the chip is
RTX Spark is Nvidia’s first processor for Windows PCs. Jensen Huang announced it at Computex in Taipei on 31 May. It puts an Arm CPU and a Blackwell graphics processor on one package, joined by Nvidia’s NVLink-C2C interconnect. MediaTek designed the CPU, and its own product page lists up to 20 cores, up to a 6,144-core GPU, up to 128GB of unified memory and up to 1 petaflop of FP4 AI performance. FP4 is the four-bit number format Nvidia’s fifth-generation Tensor Cores use for AI work.
Unified memory is the part worth understanding. The CPU and the GPU draw from one pool rather than splitting system RAM from graphics VRAM, the same approach Apple uses in the M6 and M5 Ultra. It is also why the memory ceiling separates the two configurations more than the core counts do. A language model has to fit in memory before it will run. Nvidia says a 120 billion parameter model runs locally on a 128GB machine. On 32GB it will not, and the extra GPU cores cannot help. The memory itself is LPDDR5X.
The machines
Lenovo announced two laptops at the show:
- Yoga Pro 9n: A 15.3-inch 2.5K OLED screen at 165Hz, up to 128GB of LPDDR5X-9400, up to 4TB of storage, a 92.5Wh battery, 1.65kg.
- Yoga 9n 2-in-1: A 16-inch 2.8K OLED at 120Hz, up to 64GB, up to 2TB of storage, a 99.99Wh battery, 1.94kg.
Acer showed a compact desktop. Nvidia says these join six manufacturers already shipping in October. At Computex it named ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft Surface and MSI, with Acer and GIGABYTE to follow.
Prices?
Nvidia did not give prices. Lenovo listed both laptops as TBD. The only figures in circulation come from a Morgan Stanley note in June, which put N1X laptops at about USD 2,899 and the eventual N1 machines at about USD 1,799. Those are analyst estimates. At 129.5 shillings to the dollar, USD 2,899 is about KES 375,000 before shipping, duty and VAT.
One caution before October. RTX Spark runs Windows on Arm, which is why the chip is late: Nvidia and MediaTek pushed the launch from the second half of 2025 into 2026, partly because Microsoft’s Arm build of Windows was not ready. Older x86 software runs through emulation, at a cost that varies by application.
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