So Nvidia has announced the RTX Spark chip, its first CPU—or should that be APU—for the PC. Except the chip is basically a rebadge of the GB10 superchip in the DGX Spark desktop AI box that it launched in October last year. And it uses pretty ancient CPU cores licensed from Arm. So when might we see a true Nvidia CPU in the PC?
Actually, Nvidia answered that question in its Computex keynote. CEO Jensen Huang revealed a roadmap for RTX Spark stretching a further two generations and out to 2030. And here’s the really important bit: Nvidia plans to launch an RTX Spark using Nvidia’s Vera CPU in 2028.
As Nvidia has already announced, Vera is the company’s first CPU with cores designed in-house. The CPU in the first generation RTX Spark has Nvidia’s Grace chiplet, which was designed in a collaboration with Mediatek and has CPU cores licensed from ARM.
What’s more, those CPU cores aren’t even Arm’s latest designs. Grace has two different Arm cores, one is a generation old, the other two generations old. But Vera is Nvidia’s first in-house CPU design using its new Olympus cores and when Nvidia initially announced it as a processor for AI servers, we hoped and wondered if those Olympus cores would ever come to the PC.
Well, now we know that they are and even when they’re coming, in 2028. Exactly how good Vera’s Olympus cores are isn’t totally clear. We’ve only just had the first third-party benchmarks, albeit with workloads somewhat dictated by Nvidia.
For what it’s worth, in the Computex keynote, Huang said Vera’s single-threaded performance “has to be world class, absolutely the best,” which obviously bodes well. Where things get more complicated is software support.
Nvidia is unsurprisingly making lots of positive noises about game support on RTX Spark. But the problem is that the next-gen Vera CPU in 2028 will inevitably be very different from the Arm-licensed cores in the first-gen RTX Spark’s Grace CPU. So, it’s not clear that any work done for the first Grace-based RTX Spark making game ports or optimising Windows’ Prism emulation layer for x86 applications running on Arm CPUs will automatically benefit the next-gen Vera CPU.
You could argue it’s a little odd that Nvidia is launching the whole RTX Spark thing with the Grace Blackwell generation. In many ways, it would seem to make more sense to wait for the Vera Rubin generation in 2028 with Nvidia’s own CPUs, which will presumably form the basis of future RTX Spark CPUs, including the Rosa Feyman generation which Huang also revealed is due in 2030.
As it is, RTX Spark is launching with some relatively ancient licensed CPU cores which will duly be dropped in favour of Nvidia’s surely far superior cores in 2028. Perhaps all this generation of RTX Spark is supposed to do is get the ball rolling in terms of relationships with hardware vendors for laptops, with Microsoft regarding x86 emulation and with game devs for porting x86 titles.
But at least now we know when the first true Nvidia CPU for the PC is arriving. And it’s 2028. Here’s hoping those Olympus cores are still “absolutely the best” by then.