Nvidia’s RTX Spark laptops are gunning for the MacBook Pro. Yawn

Source Domain: www.macworld.com

Nvidia just announced its new consumer laptop/desktop chip at Computex—RTX Spark—along with a host of partnerships from hardware manufacturers and Microsoft. It’s all anyone can talk about right now, and one of the most often-repeated lines is that Nvidia just put the MacBook Pro on notice. This is it… this is the superchip that will make Windows laptops put the nail in the MacBook Pro’s coffin.

I find the RTX Spark chip extremely interesting, and it’s definitely aiming at a market segment that overlaps the MacBook Pro, but I’m not sure it’s time for Apple to start sweating. High-performance Windows PCs exist today, and a somewhat better spin on them isn’t going to spell the end for Apple.

What is RTX Spark?

In brief, RTX Spark is a new chip made for high-performance thin and light laptops or small-form-factor desktops. It’s up to 20 ARM cores made by MediaTek (10 Cortex-X925 and 10 Cortex-A725) and an Nvidia Blackwell GPU with up to 6,144 cores, joined together with an NVLink chip-to-chip interconnect.. It can be configured with up to 128GB of LPDDR5x unified memory. It’s literally the DGX Spark AI workstation chip that Nvidia announced last spring and shipped in the fall, only optimized for laptops and consumer PCs.

In other words, it’s similar to an M5 Max, only with more GPU power.

RTX Spark is DGX Spark from last year, but for Windows laptops.

Nvidia

It’s targeting a power draw in the 45W to 80W range, and is being launched in partnership with Microsoft, which means all the RTX Spark laptops and desktops run Windows.

What’s the big deal? Well, it should deliver a lot of performance, especially for AI tasks, for laptops in this class. It’s also an ARM CPU, not x86, and Windows on ARM has had its share of issues over the years. But this partnership with Microsoft is supposed to mean that the two companies have been working together to really smooth out those problems and provide…

Source