NVIDIA has been preparing to release its exclusive laptop chips for the consumer segment this year, marking the firm’s first entry into a market traditionally dominated by Intel/AMD. Here is an extensive coverage of everything you need to know about the upcoming NVIDIA laptop SoCs, to frame your purchase decision.
NVIDIA’s Laptop Chips: Why Does a $4 Trillion AI Giant Need To Step into This Market at All?
This is a question that not everyone might think about, given that a typical consumer’s focus is on NVIDIA releasing laptop chips. However, it is important to know about the ‘why’ behind such a launch, given that not only with such a release, NVIDIA intends to compete with decades-long dominance set by x86 counterparts, but the firm would also allocate a huge chunk of supply chain resources to this venture, which is a much more ‘costly’ bet to take, especially in current times, when the infrastructure buildout is booming.
Well, before I dive into the actual reasoning, NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang might have himself revealed the company’s intention behind launching laptop chips, and here’s what he had to say:
There’s 150 million laptops sold per year, and NVIDIA’s market largely targets gaming and workstation markets where discrete GPUs are used. And we’re very successful there. There’s an entire segment of the market where the CPU and the GPU are integrated. And that segment has been largely unaddressed by NVIDIA today.
That entire segment of the market is really quite rich, and it’s really quite large, and it’s underserved today with a state-of-the-art world-class GPUs like NVIDIA is able to.
– NVIDIA’s CEO when discussing Intel partnership
When we talk about the biggest opportunities in the PC industry for vendors like NVIDIA and AMD, it is indeed the ‘AI PC’ narrative, which has recently reached a new high. CPU manufacturers have repackaged their portfolios around on-device AI capabilities, as evidenced by their work with NPU engines such as Intel’s NPU and AMD XDNA. At the same time, NVIDIA believes that it has a solid chance at capitalizing on a large portion of this ‘AI PC’ hype by releasing its own consumer-class chips, and by essentially doing so, the firm is now eying the laptop TAM, which opens up a new revenue segment.
Image Credits: NVIDIA
Apart from this, another important point to mention is that NVIDIA is the only company in the world that provides cutting-edge hardware/software portfolios when it comes to AI, and in the case of laptop chips, the one element that we are expecting to be prevalent is the integration of the company’s open-source model stack, Nemotron, alongside laptop SoCs. NVIDIA has been doubling down on its efforts towards open-source LLMs, and one way the firm could see large-scale adoption is by pairing its upcoming laptop chips with Nemotron models, leveraging the edge AI frenzy.
Imagine this: if NVIDIA manages to gain a large share of consumer devices, it could offer on-device AI features as native technologies, giving it a large share of the upcoming opportunities in edge AI. This is an edge that Intel/AMD cannot achieve, at least in the near term, since these firms aren’t involved in building foundational models, but only have the means to power them. Ultimately, by owning both the LLMs and the compute to run them, NVIDIA is looking to capitalize on the growing ‘edge AI’ segment, which is expected to reach up to $160 billion in valuation by 2030.
Well, the prospect of NVIDIA introducing a laptop chip has been floating online for almost 2 years now, and it was initially rumored that we would see a showcase at last year’s Computex. While we didn’t get to see laptop chips, NVIDIA did introduce a similar solution, the GB10 SuperChip, which powers the DGX Spark ‘mini AI supercomputer’. We won’t talk much about DGX Spark here, but the more important point was that NVIDIA was trying to lay a foundation in the AI PC space by providing compute capabilities at the edge for users.
It was rumored that NVIDIA would be collaborating with MediaTek on the laptop chip product, and the partnership isn’t just limited to consumer chips; they have already worked on the automotive segment as well, through the ‘Dimensity Auto’ chips, which feature the RTX GPU IP onboard as well. So, it wouldn’t be exactly right to say that the NVIDIA-MediaTek collaboration is unexpected. Still, we have already seen solutions that point us towards the fact that a product of the laptop market is incomng soon.
For those unaware, we are expecting the SoCs to be codenamed “N1X” and “N1”, with the latter being the less powerful. We have already seen these SKUs surface on public benchmark platforms, suggesting they are pretty close to an official launch.
NVIDIA’s Laptop SoCs: The Technical Rundown
Let’s talk about the laptop chip itself and what it features onboard, starting with the technical specifications. The NVIDIA SoC will feature ‘ARM foundations’, which means that the firm will employ ARM cores onboard, and the reason behind this decision is simple. The NVIDIA-ARM partnership has already been quite extensive in the enterprise segment, with DC processors, so there’s no hesitation in extending it to the consumer segment. At the same time, MediaTek also employs ARM cores in its mobile SoCs, and since power efficiency is a key requirement for this market, it makes sense to use ARM for laptops as well.
Now, there’s speculation on the exact ARM IP to be employed. To make the SoC exclusive, NVIDIA could co-design an architecture with ARM, giving Team Green more leverage over the product and, in a way, standing out from existing ARM customers in the same market, such as Apple and Qualcomm. If we see NVIDIA follow the trend that we witnessed with the GB10 SuperChip, the firm could adopt the ARM v9.2 architecture, but that remains to be seen for now.
Regarding the process node, it is reported that we will see TSMC’s 3nm process, similar to what we saw with the GB10 chip, which is why we commented earlier that the upcoming laptop chip has a lot in common with what you see inside the DGX Spark. Regarding other specifics of the CPU portion, you are looking at a 20-core cluster with a base clock of 2.81 GHz and a 4 GHz boost clock. These specifications emerged from a recent Geekbench entry that points to the superior N1X chip, so you can expect the N1 to be confined to 8 or 12-core configurations.
In terms of the onboard RTX GPU chiplet, we are expecting it to be Blackwell-based, yet again, similar to the GB10, only this time, you are looking at a much superior gaming performance. According to initial estimates, the N1X chip will feature a 6144-CUDA-core arrangement with 48 SMs, but performance isn’t expected to be too hardcore, given that it’s a mobile-focused solution. The benchmark also showed that the N1X chip boasts a TDP of up to 120W, which is similar to those of competitors like AMD’s Strix Halo and Intel’s Lunar Lake.
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RTX 5070 Desktop (6144 Cores)
You are also looking at support for LPDDR5X memory and up to 1 PetaFlops of FP4 AI compute, driven by NVIDIA’s push to make its laptop chip offering a suitable option for on-device AI capabilities. It is expected that the initial launch will be confined to a few SKUs, likely in the laptop segment, yet NVIDIA is rumored to scale this platform towards handhelds as well, aiming to capitalize on a much broader market share in the gaming industry.
NVIDIA’s Laptop Market Plans Are Much More Extensive than ARM Chips, But Supply Constraints Might Hold Them Back
While the N1 series is expected to be an aggressive release from NVIDIA targeting the laptop space, it is also worth noting that the company is working on an x86-based laptop chip in its partnership with Intel. So, essentially, NVIDIA could become the only manufacturer to offer both x86 and ARM-based laptop chips, potentially creating a portfolio that could shave market share from existing players like Intel/AMD. This signals that NVIDIA’s entry into this segment isn’t a ‘one-time’ thing; it has a much longer and planned-out release timeline.
However, one important point is that existing constraints in the AI supply chain might prevent NVIDIA from achieving its ambitions to scale.
We do know that DRAM is under severe supply constraints in the past few quarters, and to top it off, production lines at TSMC are also reported to be ‘fully booked’ as well, which means that if NVIDIA intends to ramp up the adoption of its laptop SoCs, it would need to find a tradeoff between the consumer and the enterprise segment. In the current landscape, we expect that if the N1X/N1 chips are revealed at this year’s Computex, their availability won’t be as widespread as one would’ve hoped, given that the supply chain requirements for higher-scale output are ‘too much’ right now.
Vendors like Dell and Lenovo are already preparing for NVIDIA’s laptop chips to debut soon, indicating that several manufacturers are interested in what Team Green has in store. For now, pricing details are uncertain, but given that the retail price of the DGX Spark was outrageous, we do not expect the N1X/N1 chips to follow a similar path, so a viable estimate for N1X laptops could be around $1,500-$2,000, depending on specific configurations.
Common FAQs:
Should I wait for NVIDIA’s laptop chips, instead of opting for AMD/Intel ones?
Answer: Well, it’s entirely up to the consumer for now. If you are looking for something new from a manufacturer known for producing the best gaming GPUs, then waiting for the N1X/N1 chips might be worthwhile. At the same time, AMD/Intel has launched impressive lineups in recent times, such as Strix Halo and Panther Lake, that have proven capable platforms across all consumer workloads, so they are the better choice if you are looking for something reliable and immediate.
When will these laptops be available to buy?
Answer: For now, it is rumored that these chips will be showcased at Computex, which starts in the first week of June, but retail availability isn’t certain. We could see initial retail units available by Q3 of this year, but given the current state of the supply chain, this timeline could stretch even further.
How will these laptop chips benefit NVIDIA over the AI hype?
Answer: This release would give NVIDIA access to the biggest consumer market, which is of personal devices, and this is a segment where the ‘AI innovation’ is not yet fully compelling among gamers, which hinders adoption. By powering compute and AI on the device alone, Team Green not only opens new TAM opportunities worth ‘billions in revenue,’ but also allows consumers to use AI in a way that actually benefits them.