Windows laptops powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Arm chips hit the market in 2024—their reception has been tepid, to say the least. Initially, incredible battery life was offset by poor gaming performance, and both Intel and AMD have caught up on efficiency since then.
Now, in 2026, during the worst time in decades to buy a new laptop, Nvidia wants to power your next one with Arm.
The RTX Spark N1X Arm chip, to be specific. It’s a 20-core design with an integrated “Blackwell RTX GPU” sporting 6,144 smaller cores, according to Nvidia’s promotional material, and it supports a maximum of 128GB of memory. That’ll be available for both laptops and mini PCs (“compact desktops”). A slightly less extreme version with 18/5,120 cores and a surprisingly spare 32GB memory maximum will be exclusive to laptops.
Hardware will be coming from the biggest names in the PC industry. Lenovo, Dell, HP, Asus, MSI, and Microsoft are all confirmed partners, though exactly when they’ll have products available—and what prices and form factors they’ll be available in—hasn’t been nailed down.
But the first ones will land in October. Nvidia confirmed at least one new RTX Spark-powered laptop from Lenovo, a variant of the Yoga 9 design christened the Yoga 9n 2-in-1. Lots of others were previewed at Computex, too, notably the Surface Ultra.
There’s at least one mini PC coming, presumably in October, from Acer. Since the mini PCs with Spark so far have been fully focused on “AI,” I wouldn’t hunt for anything particularly relevant to consumers in that area.
Arm chips aren’t really made for gaming, at least not PC gaming. You can find plenty of them powering other devices, including VR headsets, small emulation gaming gadgets from the likes of Anbernic and Retroid, both generations of the Nintendo Switch (which use Nvidia Arm designs). But Nvidia is hoping to change that more or less overnight. It claims that “the biggest game publishers are onboard” for the RTX Spark rollout, including EA, Ubisoft, Konami, Capcom, CD Projekt Red, and Xbox.
Presumably that means all of the publishers and developers under Microsoft’s massive and somewhat raggedy banner will at least be aware of RTX Spark and given resources to make their games compatible.
The promotional material from Nvidia seems to promise everything to everyone, at least in terms of laptop features. “Gaming and Creation” will be served with 100 frames per second at 1440p, “with RT & DLSS.” Given that Nvidia is quoting frame rates with 6x frame generation under the latest DLSS 5 material—and even without it many are wary of upscaling substituting for conventional rendered frames—I would hesitate to take that claim at face value, at least until I got my hands on these laptops.
And of course, we know nothing at all (at least officially) about prices. If these laptops are coming with a minimum of 24GB of memory, they’ll certainly be aimed at the high end of the spectrum… for whatever that’s worth in These Trying Times. Expect to spend several thousand dollars on these systems when they launch.
I also have concerns about Nvidia’s commitment to consumer products while it’s making several million kings’ ransoms supplying data centers. But that’ll have to wait for a longer examination. Apropos of nothing, did you know I write a weekly newsletter on gaming and performance called Boost Mode? Maybe you’ll see that next week.
