Topline
Nvidia on Monday unveiled its new RTX Spark chip for consumer Windows laptops and desktops, which it touted as being capable of running “personal AI agents,” marking the company’s first foray into making a fully integrated consumer chip as it looks to take on the likes of Intel, AMD, Apple and Qualcomm.
Key Facts
The RTX Spark is a cut-down version of the chips Nvidia uses on its AI supercomputers and the company claims it will be able to run powerful local AI agents, along with popular games and productivity software like Adobe’s Photoshop.
Nvidia has been making consumer laptops and desktop GPUs for decades, but unlike the RTX Spark—which uses the AI giant’s own custom-made CPU—those computers had to be paired with either an Intel or AMD CPU.
The announcement was made during Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote at the Computex trade show in Taiwan, where he boasted that the chipmaker and Microsoft are collaborating to “reinvent the PC.”
Huang showed off RTX Spark laptops on stage, running the latest James Bond video game “007 First Light” and the racing game “Forza Horizon 6,” followed by a Mac Mini-sized desktop also powered by the same chip.
The company did not announce a specific launch date for these new computers, but said they will be available “this fall” and be made by multiple PC manufacturers like ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI.
No pricing details were shared either, but a senior company official told the Wall Street Journal that they will be “ priced at the premium end of the market.”
Crucial Quote
“Today, when you think about your phone, the one thing you don’t do with it is make phone calls. You do just about everything else. So that phone means something very different to you, than a phone of the past. I’m certain what’s going to happen here is that the PC 10 years from now and PC you think about today…is going to be completely different,” Huang said in his keynote. He then added: “I could totally imagine that some day there’s actually an AI supercomputer in your house,” as he compared it to commonplace appliances people have today including lawnmowers and dishwashers.
This is a developing story.