It’s been a long time coming, but we finally have sight of Nvidia’s very own Arm-based CPU. And as if to remind us it’s not all a fever dream, we have sight of some actual laptops that will feature the chip, like the MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI+.
The first thing you’ve probably noticed is that this thing looks thin. And that’s kind of the point, here. There’s no discrete RTX GPU to fatten it up, rather Nvidia’s all-in-one N1X-based “superchip” called RTX Spark, which seems to want to meld the gaming and AI spheres together (from Nvidia? Who’d have thunk it).
That permits a gaming-capable laptop to have such things as a “16-inch UHD+ Tandem OLED display, 99.9Wh battery, MSI Nano Pen, MSI Action Touchpad, and a versatile flip form factor for mobile productivity and entertainment.”
Make no mistake, though, it’s a gaming PC. And with RTX Spark machines all signs point towards that meaning some actual gaming performance. We’d heard rumours of RTX 5070-level frame rates from an upcoming Nvidia processor for a very long time, and now Nvidia confirms that this was correct, although it will depend on the game.
That game-dependent caveat exists in large part because the RTX Spark isn’t a standard x86 CPU. It’s Arm-based, meaning it runs Windows-on-Arm and will have to emulate some apps through Microsoft’s Prism layer. So you probably shouldn’t expect a standard experience in all respects from this MSI machine. But thus is the penalty for progress.
It’s certainly an exciting prospect now we can see just how thin an RTX 5070-level laptop can be. The two-in-one flip design we see here (use it as a tablet or laptop, or in between in ‘tent’ format) would certainly have seemed a stretch to combine with such gaming performance on more traditional hardware with a discrete GPU.
There’s no mention of price, though, and on that front I can’t imagine anything other than a sharp sting.