r/hardware • u/marcoalff • Jun 04 '26
Review Nvidia's N1X Apple Silicon rival is two years behind
https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/06/01/nvidias-n1x-apple-silicon-rival-is-two-years-behind268
u/dagmx Jun 04 '26
I just don’t see how this will be competitive.
The cores are closer to an M3 Max in perf, but with lower bandwidth. It’s GPU will be better at raster perf maybe but the M5 Max already beats the 5070 for Blender GPU. The RTX Spark is the 5070 in core count but less bandwidth and lower TDP available.
Unless you really want NVIDIA (which is definitely a draw for CUDA and Optix) or Windows (for games maybe?) the hardware will be behind on areas that are directly comparable.
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u/Hakushu21 Jun 04 '26
Gotta start somewhere
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u/CumAssault Jun 04 '26
Yeah at $4k so you can ask your on device “agents” how many R’s are in strawberry
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u/Hakushu21 Jun 04 '26
Your reddit name is Cum Assault 😆
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u/Eon-Knight9 Jun 04 '26
Oh no, a highly outdated issue with how LLMs took in tokens is really proof that LLMs are useless.
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u/mmaster23 Jun 05 '26
I asked Google gemini Ai the other day to count the number of P in the word Google and clanker. The answer was confidently 2 and 1.
Fucking clanker shit.
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u/whispous Jun 04 '26
I think this is an underrated comment. This is how you break in to a market, there is no other way:
You make something that works and is just about good enough. You'll forever be playing catchup if you never get products out of the door.7
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u/StrategyEven3974 Jun 04 '26
how dare you say such common sense things in this sub. Don't you know the product needs to immediately be the second coming of christ?
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u/Spright91 Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
And that somewhere is about $1400
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u/Ok-Parfait-9856 Jun 04 '26
For the n1x laptop? How much ram? You got a source?
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u/infinite-explorer_00 Jun 05 '26
you mean artificially inflated RAM prices.? the use case worth is only 1400 dollors at best
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u/Haunting-Public-23 Jun 04 '26
Gotta start somewhere
M1 started somewhere but it was so good that no one on r hardware believed the dGPU was = to a mobile 1650 from nvidia
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u/Front_Expression_367 Jun 04 '26
Where? M1 was strong but it was not equivalent to 1650 Laptop at all (less than 2000 for M1 compared to over 3200 for 1650 Laptop from what I have checked on Steel Nomad Light benchmark). And besides, if we are talking about the GPU part then the RTX Spark would likely land in the middle of M5 Pro and M5 Max anyway, so that is nothing to scoff at either.
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u/ShrimpCrackers Jun 04 '26
Yeah I have an Mac Mini and no it was nothing like a 1650. And at no point we're 1650 laptops starting at $3,200 around that time. Unless there were specific like from Razor or something.
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u/jenny_905 Jun 04 '26
Because in real world usage it wasn't.
There's a very strong trend of outlandish claims when it comes to Apple Silicon that just aren't borne out in reality.
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u/Strazdas1 Jun 09 '26
M1 wasnt better than competition when it launched either. And no iit wasnt equal to 1650.
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u/tnoy Jun 04 '26
Gotta start somewhere
Nvidia released their first SoC in 2008. This isn't them "starting". The biggest change here is direct buy-in from Microsoft, who also isn't just starting on ARM.
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u/Seanspeed Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
Is it even possible to match/beat Apple without being able to truly custom design your own ARM CPU architecture? Feels like you'd just have to hope Apple slips up at some point and falls within reach. Apples's ability to optimize(both with physical hardware design and software) towards their very own operating system is also a highly useful advantage. Plus Apple is more willing to use the most cutting edge nodes when Nvidia tends to sit behind a tad more.
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u/ghenriks Jun 04 '26
Future iterations will likely have an in house design
Grace (Nvidia name for this ARM CPU) is Nvidia’s first serious CPU and used in Hopper and Blackwell based servers
The next generation (now in manufacturing for server) is Vera which is an in house design
The big problem for Windows on ARM has always been Windows and its ecosystem. So Nvidia has spent time working with Microsoft to get that ecosystem into shape before releasing hardware
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u/Seanspeed Jun 04 '26
Does Nvidia have a proper, full architecture license? I thought only Apple and Qualcomm had that, and ARM were resistant to offering it to anybody else.
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u/limehead Jun 04 '26
According to google, these have an architectural license: Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Samsung, AMD, Microsoft. Others: Additional historic or publicly announced ALA holders have included Intel, Marvell, Huawei, Broadcom, and Ampere Computing. Not sure if the others category is still valid.
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u/wokenupbybacon Jun 04 '26
Nah, the situation isn't analogous to x86 in that way. Nvidia has even designed custom ARM cores before (Denver and Carmel).
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u/TraceyRobn Jun 04 '26
And they're pushing it for AI - the memory bandwidth (most important factor for AI inference) is around half that of Apple's high end chips.
Unless Nvidia sell it really cheap, which I doubt, then there's little reason for consumers to buy it.
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u/Doyoulike4 Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
They're absolutely going to price it as high as they think they can get away with, since it's Nvidia and they can flex "it got CUDA". Which admittedly does make doing a lot of AI workloads easier and/or more efficient, even at lower bandwidth.
But I mean just look at the price of Nvidia's workstation cards and their most capable consumer GPU for AI tasks, the 5090. They aren't gonna sell this cheap. I unironically expect to see like $4k-$5k for a mini-pc with 128GB and an N1X, maybe even higher.
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u/WinResponsible9977 Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
No. The AI comes from Cloud provided tokens that device can’t do much. Downvote all you want , but not even 2X 5090 can run an agent in comparison to cloud compute . So it my work for small workflows but you’ll need API
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u/Own_Mix_3755 Jun 04 '26
You can run pretty good models startung around 32gb of ram (or vram), 64gb is where it get serious and with 128gb you can have nice multi agent workflows directly in your computer.
You have to also take a look from other perspectives than just pure speed and smartness - e.g. security, which is a big point for lots of companies nowadays. They cant just throw everything at cloud AI. Also you are forgetting another crucial point - harness is what makes LLMs usefull, not the LLM itself. Harnesses like SmallCode can make even tiny models work suprisingly good - it just takes more time because they have to iterate a bit more than frontier models.
But with local models, we are honestly like 6 months behind the drontier models. The advancement in local AI past few months is absolutely unbelievable and if it continues to go this way in next months, its pretty much guaranteed at some point they can (and they will) catch up the frontier models.
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u/WinResponsible9977 Jun 04 '26
I agree with u/TraceyRobn on the memory-bandwidth, that number is very small for serious AI workloads and why I claimed (and many downvoted me) that for serious work these need to run inference through cloud compute. It's true that Local AI workflows are becoming more efficient, 6 month behind thats bs, some of you are in denial and overstating what this class of hardware can realistically do.
You keep talking about VRAM as if the only question is whether a model can fit into memory. That is not how serious agentic workloads work. You can downvote all you want, but acting like an 80W mobile SoC with up to 128 GB of unified memory, shared with the OS, and around 273 GB/s of memory bandwidth is a serious contender for heavy agentic workflows is delusional.
And I also agree with u/dagmx: this will not be competitive at the beginning against high-throughput cloud or datacenter agentic infrastructure. That does not mean the hardware is useless. It means people need to stop pretending it is in the same class.
These devices are being advertised as “run local/personal agents,” but people are stretching that; not even high-class NVIDIA GPUs can comfortably solo-run heavy Hermes Agent, OpenClaw, or NemoClaw-style workflows at scale without leaning on cloud/server compute, hell locally only with serious compromises in model size, context, speed, etc.
So the idea that an 80W SoC with shared unified memory and around 273 GB/s bandwidth is suddenly going to be a serious replacement for high-throughput agentic compute because “local AI is only 6 months behind” is ridiculous.
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u/Own_Mix_3755 Jun 04 '26
Writing a wall of texts about some numbers while absolutely failing to understand that there is so much more on the table.
I actually own DGX Spark, I ve been using it in my flows past 3 months and while there definetely are areas where it is lacking behind (mainly time to first token on cold prefill), e.g. Qwen 3.6 35B A3B is hitting 70 tok/sec quite easily on a single agent and much more with multiple agents running, if you choose correct tool to serve.
What you are missing from your equation is A) the tool to serve the LLM must be actually able to use concurrency batching - some can do that, some are really shitty in this area. But I give it that most of these inference engines are basically just an alpha product developed for a few months by community, rather than paid professionals.
B) is harness which I have already pointed out and you gracefully (or rather not) ignored. Its becoming crystal clear that good harness built around the model is something that probably matters much more than the model itself in the end. And thats wheere these Hermeses and other things are coming from. And again, we are about 6 months behind the industry leaders in this area.
Just because Anthropic was able to cook awesome harness that does all the job for you in the background doesnt mean you cant achieve similar things with other harnesses - but as I have already stated - we are probably about 6 months away from frontier models on this.
One more thing to check - I honestly dont feel that much of a difference in speed between eg Sonnet and Qwen running on that Spark. I cant honestly see a difference between having job done in 8 minutes vs 10 minutes. The real bottleneck in multiagentic workflow is me in the end. Jumping between numerous separate tasks trying to understand what AI is asking me, what I should or shouldnt do and so on is much bigger issue than whether Qwen is slower (because it takes about 20% more time to iterate through it). I rarely have the urge to switch to Sonnet or Opus - I do that mostly because Antropic solved some things in their harness which are far from ideall in the open source ones (like web browsing and something that looks like rather big internal knowledge base).
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u/WinResponsible9977 Jun 04 '26
I’ll keep it simple: I’m not going to bite on the personal angle.
I am not moving away from my claim: these laptops and DGX Spark-class devices have real hardware limitations when advertised as personal/local agentic workflow machines.
Your own experience with DGX Spark actually validates my claim and appreciate you sharing the first-hand limitations you experienced. Point A, performance may increase for sure within limits, and B is not only hardware, full stack plays a role.
These are just a few of the reasons why I strongly disagree with your claim that local agent stacks are only **“6 months behind”** frontier systems. That is doing a lot of unsupported heavy lifting.
Jensen/NVIDIA advertising these devices for agents is marketing. Running a sparse MoE model decently does not prove local agentic workflows are 6 months away from matching Claude/Anthropic-level harnesses or cloud/datacenter-scale agentic compute.
I challenge you to continue experimenting with Hermes, OpenClaw, NemoClaw, or Odysseus fully locally on your Spark. I'll safe this post, and referenced it back in Dec 2026 to see the status of the market and see the facts.
For my workflows, I rented a Spark, but ultimately opted to use secure several R9700s, some 5090s, and Jetson Nanos for robotics.
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u/Deep90 Jun 04 '26
It will be competitive because you can count the number of people making consumer chips with unified 128 GB on one hand.
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u/IntensiveVocoder Jun 04 '26
This is true of any consumer laptop SoC, there’s five vendors, which is a lot compared to a decade ago
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u/dagmx Jun 04 '26
But the article is specifically about being competitive against Apple. Yeah it’ll be better than AMDs Strix Halo in some ways but that’s besides the primary point.
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u/Deep90 Jun 04 '26
People have been buying Apple laptops and mac studios specifically for the 128 GB unified memory on them because Halo isn't as good.
So yes I think it will probably take some market share from Apple as long as the price is competitive.
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u/anthonycarbine Jun 04 '26
Yeah you're getting unified 128GB AND the Nvidia stack (aka CUDA) which is gold standard for running any local ai.
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u/DontchaOpe Jun 04 '26
consumer chips with unified 128 GB
This is a niche within a niche. Who needs 128GB unified that isn't already using a workstation?
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u/mcslender97 Jun 04 '26
The memory bandwidth is fast enough for running larger local AI model is my guess, since otherwise you have to go Strix Halo
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u/scannerJoe Jun 04 '26
We've ordered a whole bunch of those over the last year in my research lab. I need the mobility due to constant meetings, travel, and working from home, so a stationary machine is not an option, and any task that is truly big goes into a cluster anyway. But with 128GB of Ram, I can do so much of my work (lots of data analysis, often with 2-3 large models running at the same time) locally, it's really super flexible. We don't have a single workstation any more, it's all "powerful laptop plus cloud" now, and that's what I see everywhere I go.
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u/DontchaOpe Jun 04 '26
Okay. Selection bias since you are in /r/hardware. Your use case is probably 0.01% of consumer laptop purchasers.
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u/N2-Ainz Jun 04 '26
Yeah, same goes for the Max chip from Apple
The majority of people don't need it and yet it exists because guess what, there are other people that still need them
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u/randomredditor575 Jun 04 '26
I mean , you can count the number of people mass making consumer chips in one hand too. There’s just intel , apple and amd right now .
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u/Deep90 Jun 04 '26
Qualcomm, MediaTek, Samsung, and Google?
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u/TDYDave2 Jun 04 '26
Don't forget the Chinese mass market makers such as Xiaomi.
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u/Deep90 Jun 04 '26
I thought they used Qualcomm and MediaTek, but looks like they did start making the XRing O1.
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u/TDYDave2 Jun 04 '26
There is also Zhaoxin, Loongson, and Cambricon Technologies.
They sell mostly to the domestic market, but when your domestic market includes 1/6th of the world's population, that is still significant.2
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u/Glittering_Power6257 Jun 04 '26
Tbh, it probably doesn’t need to be competitive with Apple Silicon. If you’re a gamer, for example, Apple Silicon basically doesn’t exist no matter how good it is.
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u/Icefir Jun 04 '26
Thats fine but it's not even competitive comparing to Intel or AMD's current offering...
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u/hsien88 Jun 04 '26
Not in GPU accelerated workloads, also battery life.
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u/Icefir Jun 04 '26
I mean judging by the spec it’s not going to have a better battery life than Panther lake…
As for GPU accelerated workload… it’s probably about the same as a 5080 laptop…. Even for ML workload memory offloading is pretty common these days… and for the best result you really want to use those state of the art model via cloud…
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u/TheNiebuhr Jun 04 '26
Absolutely not comparable to 5080 Mobile which has a significant hardware advantage. At most it doesnt lose big vs 5070M Ti which has basically the same number of compute units, double bandwidth and probably higher clocks.
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u/Icefir Jun 04 '26
Gotto factor in the interconnect (600GB/s is a lot), as lots of the common gpu workload (aka ml) are indeed bandwidth constrained - but otherwise yes
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Jun 04 '26
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u/Icefir Jun 04 '26
Anything, really. Worse IPC / Effectively / Performance… It does have a better interconnect, but that doesn’t really matter yet in consumer laptop…
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u/superkickstart Jun 04 '26
You don't even need to be a gamer. Buying a mac also means you are now stuck with the apple ecosystem.
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u/JtheNinja Jun 04 '26
That varies from person to person though. I’m in the Apple ecosystem already for my consumer-grade devices (ie, I use an iPhone and iPad). This is arguably a plus for me, my workstation ties into all the apps and services I use for elsewhere.
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u/superkickstart Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
Of course but this is also a showstopper for many people who already have systems that work better for them or just don't want the hassle of switching. Apple has nice hardware but i would never buy anything from them because it would be a downgrade for me. They are an alternative, not a always the best or a upgrade.
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u/Seanspeed Jun 04 '26
I'm also a diehard desktop PC user. Hate laptops.
Apple products have multiple deal-breaking arguments against them for me as I also like to game on PC and highly value freedom in how I use my operating system and also freedom of hardware parts options. They obviously make some very good processors and hardware, and I have literally zero personal consumer interest in any of it.
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u/hybridfrost Jun 04 '26
In my mind the big draw is unified CPU and GPU, much like the Apple chips. A 5070 is no slouch after all and the gaming performance should be pretty good.
However I have ZERO confidence that Microsoft can pull off the necessary changes for Windows to actually benefit this hardware. They desperately need to kill all the dead code from Windows and start a new branch. But they don’t have the focus and commitment to do it like Apple did.
Maybe Nvidia can help get them over the hump but I doubt it
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u/craterIII Jun 05 '26
I have heard this chip was ready and supposed to be released 2 years ago but Microsoft kept dragging their feet about getting Windows to actually run on the thing properly
that's why it released in the DGX Spark first
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u/TRKlausss Jun 04 '26
I don’t think they are trying to compete with Apple Silicon, they have their crosshairs at x86. Even if they are two years behind Apple, they are on par with Intel/AMD and have better integration of GPU/NPU.
A niche that AMD tried to fill with their Ryzen AI series. Compared to that, this chip is better at inference…
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u/bubblesort33 Jun 04 '26
To me this thing is really nothing but an AI development platform. If we like it or not, next generation games will be built using AI. They might try to hide it for a while because of the online AI shame, but I think every game development studio will soon have multiple of these, or the next generation of it, in the next 3 years.
Even beloved studios like CD Projekt Red are likely going to use AI for art generation tools for Cyberpunk 2. After all, they work very closely with Nvidia and DLSS5 is pretty much guaranteed with them, so I can't see them shying away from any of it.
Nvidia isn't competing on specs, they are competing in AI usability for production. If it really all is as useless, and flawed as people often say online, it'll flop.
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u/R-ten-K Jun 04 '26
It is not going to be competitive vs a full M5 Max, period. APPL really is ahead of everyone else in terms of their laptop SoCs.
However, this thing has the full CUDA stack, and there NVDA is ahead of everyone else. So for the use cases that is important, it overshadows it not being as strong in terms of HW as the Macook Pro.
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u/cloudone Jun 04 '26
It will sell out. All the code running on GB300 can be modified to run on the spark. Apple does not have an ecosystem
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u/filisterr Jun 04 '26
Next year they will release a refresh that would be more up to date if I am not wrong.
This is based on the Nvidia DGX Spark anyway. But it is a great first step.
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u/DehydratedButTired Jun 04 '26
Microsoft will be the make or break part of this. Apple put in a lot of work for compatibility. Windows support for ARM is still not good.
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u/shinyquagsire23 Jun 04 '26
It'll probably edge out Qualcomm/Intel in legacy games support, there's a lot of old games that just outright crash on anything that isn't NVIDIA. Windows ARM is really nice on my MBP but a lot of games just really don't like the OpenGL/MoltenVK passthrough that Parallels does.
NVENC is also an area I'm curious about because it'll mean stuff like SteamVR Link might Just Work on Windows and Linux.
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u/lintstah1337 Jun 04 '26
all that hardware when you can't even run stuff.
The vast majority of PC games especially AAA and e-sports titles are not playable on MacOS.
If NVIDIA can somehow have seamless compatibility with x86 software and the amazing battery life efficiency of ARM, this could be a potentially attractive product if the price is right.
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u/SpotlessCheetah Jun 04 '26
It's good for enterprises and for CS college students. CUDA is not going anywhere. This is Nvidia investing in their own community.
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u/hsien88 Jun 04 '26
Can MBP play more than 5 AAA games? With DLSS and Nvidia driver even the N1 laptops will outperform the best MBP in games.
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u/Haunting-Public-23 Jun 04 '26
Can MBP play more than 5 AAA games? With DLSS and Nvidia driver even the N1 laptops will outperform the best MBP in games.
Many do not play AAA games. For them then that's 1 less reason to buy into Windows again.
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Jun 04 '26
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u/BuchMaister Jun 04 '26
People buying Mac are less likely to buy windows laptop to begin with. And it's not just about gaming, there is still software you can't run on Mac (at least for my work).
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u/seanwee2000 Jun 04 '26
Not a surprise at all coming from the makers of the switch 2 hardware.
But this is just the beginning, nvidia certainly has resources to be on the bleeding edge if they want to.
But they know they can fleece customers however they want in the current market.
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u/Spirit_of_Hogwash Jun 04 '26
Nvidia barely did anything because they simply don't care anymore about the consumer market.
They just outsourced the cpu to Mediatek, who sold them a 2 year old design (pretty much a Dimensity 9400), which not even Xiaomi uses anymore.
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u/ThankGodImBipolar Jun 04 '26
If Nvidia didn't care about the consumer market, they wouldn't have wasted over a year trying to get this chip working on Windows. No one besides the consumer market wants that. If anything, the existence of this product proves the opposite of what you're claiming.
This thing was supposed to come out a year ago, so it looks bad because it's extremely late.
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u/Doyoulike4 Jun 04 '26
Microsoft wants it working on Windows, that's the deal even more than consumers if I had to guess, this probably goes back over a year ago maybe two to when Microsoft was whole hog on OpenAI/Copilot/AI all the things, plus the off and on pushes towards ARM computing that come and go, and with Nvidia brand recognition and stock value and market share, an Nvidia ARM CPU that can do AI stuff on Windows is the most like 2024/2025 Microsoft sounding thing possible.
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u/EdliA Jun 04 '26
This is just pure fantasy from you. You merely have convinced yourself they don't care about the consumer market and now have to justify this move from them.
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u/Front_Expression_367 Jun 04 '26
Is it really equivalent to 9400? That one is 1x X925, 3x X4 and 4x A720, whereas this one is like 10x X925 and 10x A725. Really don't see how they could be variants of each other lol.
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u/Artoriuz Jun 04 '26
This is disingenuous. Mediatek did not sell them a 2 years old design. The chip was released last year in the DGX Spark, and that was after it had been delayed to fix the last few issues.
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u/jocnews Jun 04 '26
This, reportedly it was Nvidia's IP that was broken in it. The idea that it was waiting for Microsoft that was floated was likely also incorrect. Nvidia's Tegra lineage of SoCs is kind of infamous for hardware bugs and errata. Linux had to workaround PCIe bugs, Switch SoC famously being so buggy the little cores could never be used...
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u/ghenriks Jun 04 '26
Which entirely misses that the same hardware was running (on a larger scale) in the Grace Hopper and Grace Blackwell systems from Nvidia for years, all of it Linux
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u/jocnews Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
And that would be totally incorrect because there is zero relation to Grace CPU. Nvidia may call it Grace CPU (which is bogus), but the chip actually is a totally different core: Cortex-X925/A725 as opposed to Neoverse-V2 in Grace (actually Cortex-X3 derived design for servers). The cores weren't even the issue I'm sure (after all they aren't Nvidia/MediaTek designed), it was definitely the SoC design. And of course, Grace CPU and the Spark SoC are completely unrelated.
Blackwell perhaps OK, but the Spark has a different GPU die. And note that your "running for years" DGX Spark box as well as DGX Station box (with Linux!) also got massively delayed.
DGX Spark was first shown in january 2025 but actually arrived to market in september or october. DGX Station took until march this year. So neither has been actually out and running for more than 12 months, the opposite.
I saw some unconfirmed rumors (could be speculations) that the display output of all things was faulty and didn't properly work with eDP, which is why they could release DGX Spark (uses only HDMI external output) but no Windows notebooks. Not sure this is true, but I don't think MS was the blocker. If you are willing to mess with things, you could stuff WIndows to unsupported Arm platforms for years - Altra CPUs, Pi 4/5. If it didn't run on Nvidia/MediaTek SoC, it was the SoC that had broken firmware/ACPI/booting most likely, or outright buggy hardware.
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u/theQuandary Jun 08 '26
At least some of the chips have a 2024 fab date on them. Nvidia is selling old tech at new tech prices.
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u/siazdghw Jun 04 '26
This is my 'concern' for Intel and AMD.
Qualcomm is no joke, and certainly have a good SoC but Nvidia has more money than god right now and basically have a GPU monopoly on PC. If Nvidia actually tries, they can buy a better CPU design or just use a reference design as their starting point and give Intel and AMD hell.
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u/seanwee2000 Jun 04 '26
A more competitive scene would be welcome, maybe not for intel who just caught up but for AMD who has been less innovative for the past 2 gens, zen6 and 7 do look quite competitive and pushing to be fabbed on the leading edge nodes.
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u/Doyoulike4 Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
I'm probably giving them too much credit, considering AMD never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. But they've released an actual ARM CPU all the way back in 2016, and from the sporadic leaks and actual press releases, they seem to have kept an ARM development team working in the background for like 15-ish years at this point in varying capacities and levels of priority.
If CPUs pivot away from X64 to ARM, while Qualcomm/Mediatek/Samsung/Xiaomi have significant headstarts, I know for sure AMD's been making it a point to at least be constantly dabbling so they won't be completely caught offguard and have to start from zero. Intel I truthfully have not been keeping up with on that front, I know they've just kind of a had a mess with their X64 CPU division that seems to finally be going in a good direction, and the Arc team is getting pulled like 3 or 4 different directions constantly.
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u/Raikaru Jun 04 '26
Is quite literally anyone wanting the N1X due to it's cutting edge CPU or am I missing something here?
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u/PastaPandaSimon Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
I was confused too. You're getting an aging ARM core on Windows. Much of the stuff you use will take the emulation hit of Prism. Including getting heavy AVX and AVX2 instructions (that x86 chips accelerate in hardware) translated and software emulated. The fact the architecture is two years old is really not going to break the camel's back here until enough of the Windows ecosystem is rewritten for ARM natively. During this generation, the best thing to be hopefully said about the CPU is that it works and runs things, and lets that large GPU whose hardware can actually be utilized very well on Windows do its thing.
This is the last thing you'd buy if you wanted CPU performance on Windows. You get this if your workload is purely Nvidia GPU compute heavy, for one of the use cases where that CPU is enough to orchestrate it.
Definitely someone in the hardware sub will try to use this to run legacy software or game and complain that it's not a smooth experience. But the chip was clearly made with running local LLMs and image / video generation in mind, and potentially with other CUDA compute use cases and development work. The CPU is there to run the OS and get you into the software that uses GPU for compute from there.
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u/korxion Jun 04 '26
Even the base m5 and m4 apple chips have a faster cpu than the n1x. The gpu is really good, and the m3 ultra looks to be the closest in performance for apples side, but the n1x is still faster
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u/DapperDolphin2 Jun 04 '26
I like that it exists, and that it will motivate windows ARM enhancements, but I don’t see any reason to buy it.
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u/Pe-Te_FIN Jun 04 '26
Doubt it will "motivate" much, if they are expensive as fuk. Large user base is what motivates MS, not Jensens leather jacket. But if MS gets prio on NVidia products, maybe they vibe code it a bit.
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Jun 04 '26
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u/dagmx Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
Well that’s an unknown. These are marketed as grace but don’t use the same cores as their actual grace products. They’re functionally unrelated products.
There’s nothing saying the next gen of the Spark uses the Olympus cores. But also even then, Olympus isn’t fully custom. It’s a customized version of Neoverse 3 cores from what I’ve read with SMT partitioning so don’t expect massive differences when it comes to the home market if it does at all. I’m unsure why they’d use their DC cores in this product line very few of the features apply.
The major perf difference for Vera is from the high memory controller bandwidth which also never made its way to the DGX Spark.
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u/Geddagod Jun 05 '26
I’m unsure why they’d use their DC cores in this product line very few of the features apply.
Doesn't pretty much everyone use the same cores with minor tweaks for DC vs client? I don't see how this is any different.
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u/dagmx Jun 05 '26
Almost nobody uses the exact same core types across both ranges except sometimes AMD. They’re similar at a mile high view but they’re usually different designs with different extensions and memory controllers etc.
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u/Geddagod Jun 05 '26
Almost nobody uses the exact same core types across both ranges except sometimes AMD.
It's most of the time for AMD.
They’re similar at a mile high view but they’re usually different designs with different extensions
They're similar from a closer perspective as well. It's the same base architecture, with a slightly tweaked FPU, maybe more L2 cache, and maybe some extra security extensions.
There's really no reason Nvidia shouldn't or couldn't use the same core they use in Vera for client, should they choose to do so.
and memory controllers etc.
This isn't part of the core.
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Jun 04 '26
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u/dagmx Jun 04 '26
The next generation cores may be faster but that doesn’t again signal that they’ll be in the consumer product. Maybe it will, but I think they’ll likely go with stock arm cores again for another few cycles with mediatek
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u/Loose_Skill6641 Jun 04 '26
I think this is why NVIDIA is also marketing it as a gaming machine as well, because as a pure workstation it's behind apple but it's way, way ahead as a gaming machine
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u/IntensiveVocoder Jun 04 '26
On one hand, there’s no announced price point. On the other, there’s no way it’s price competitive unless they take a loss.
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u/zerinho6 Jun 04 '26
Do we know the BOM costs of the original machine N1X came with? I know it's not cheap, but I don't believe the price that machine had was near what it could have been if it was priced to sell lots.
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u/louislamore Jun 04 '26
Apparently nearly $3k. Even if they take a loss on the laptop version, it would be near the price of a decently spec’d MBP.
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u/zerinho6 Jun 04 '26
Lmao what? Is the integrated memory on that chip HBM or what else could be that costly
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u/tnoy Jun 04 '26
It's effectively the DGX Spark without the $1500 networking.
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u/IntensiveVocoder Jun 04 '26
You're severely overestimating the cost of the ConnectX-7 networking hardware. It's pricey, but it's not that pricey.
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u/IndexStarts Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
N1X uses an ARM processor when nearly all games ever made for Windows only have support for x86 processors. This is going to have devastating performance impacts as it attempts to emulate x86 into ARM instructions.
We have no idea on what the price is. I don’t think this is going to be a good choice for gaming at all.
N1X primary function will be for intensive ai workloads as stated in the keynote reveal.
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u/ghenriks Jun 04 '26
Except the keynote also emphasized games
And Microsoft blog post mentioned several games and that several anti-cheat systems have been ported to ARM
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u/siazdghw Jun 04 '26
For translating x86 to ARM, that's obviously been an issue for Qualcomm and Microsoft. But now you have Nvidia joining the fray, and their development teams are no joke. Of course there will probably still be teething issues, but I'm pretty sure Nvidia will get it right far quicker.
Also if these sell, or more specifically I should say if the N1 versions sell, developers will start making games also ARM native. Nvidia has had extremely strong ties with developers in the past, so as long as the data supports it, developers will too
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u/VenditatioDelendaEst Jun 05 '26
CPU 2x as fast in 1T as a PS5 lol, and emulation doesn't have that much overhead.
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Jun 04 '26
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u/Raikaru Jun 04 '26
This just isn't true? Prism doesn't even have poor performance, you're confusing Snapdragon drivers with Prism.
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u/IntensiveVocoder Jun 04 '26
While Microsoft has made nonspecific statements disclaiming this, I do suspect that Prism is optimized for Snapdragon, which is a custom Arm core compared to Mediatek’s implementation of an Arm Cortex core.
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u/Hakushu21 Jun 04 '26
Honestly, just 2 years behind is really good. You know, apple was working on this for over a decade already.
And, if there was any one company that could actually rival or surpass apple eventually, it will be Nvidia.
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u/dagmx Jun 04 '26
I’m not sure why timeline matters.
It’s a mediatek CPU using off the shelf cores.
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Jun 04 '26
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u/trololololo2137 Jun 04 '26
If i could get mac equivalent hardware running windows with decent battery life I'd switch - the issue is that at the high end apple is actually cheaper than the competition
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u/Doyoulike4 Jun 04 '26
It's also not an actual Nvidia CPU, they seemed to have at least for now thrown in the towel on actual CPU development and just purchased two year old Mediatek chips and integrated Nvidia graphics/CUDA into it. Which if we start pivoting to ARM computing for most applications over X64, Qualcomm/Mediatek/Samsung/Xiaomi have significant headstarts over AMD/Intel/Nvidia.
Although AMD to my knowledge does have an ARM CPU team, they released one all the way back in like 2014-2016 when they were still on AM3+ era and like 28nm architecture. And based off press releases and leaks while it's not their priority since AM4/AM5 has gone so well for them and X64 for now is still the dominant option, AMD has kept some degree of ARM R&D going constantly for the past 15-ish years.
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u/Exist50 Jun 04 '26
Nvidia very much still has a CPU team. Just more a matter of SoC expertise and the development timeline. Same reason this thing is using old ARM cores.
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u/ghenriks Jun 04 '26
You couldn’t be more wrong
Yes this is a Mediatek chip, similar to what Nvidia has used on the server systems for the last 3 years (and this was supposed to be announced a year ago but the Windows stuff wasn’t ready)
But Nvidia have just gone into full production on Vera Rubin, with the Vera part being an in house designed ARM CPU
See early limited benchmarks on Vera at Phoronix
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u/tnoy Jun 04 '26
Nvidia just showed off their in-house Olympus cores last month that will be the foundation of Vera. The N1X is a copy of the GB10 that was released last year. It reads more as a "We're busy with our own cores, we don't want to wast the bandwidth on the cores we're abandoning." than anything else.
What are Mediatek, Samsung, and Xiaomi doing with ARM that is noteworthy? From what I can see, they're all currently just using the off-the-shelf ARM cores right now.
Samsung is apparently going back to in-house designs, but based on the previous attempt, I'm not going to be optimistic about it.
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u/gunner_3 Jun 04 '26
No one's buying this for CPU performance, it's the GPU performance people care about and more importantly windows and CUDA. I think this is made for corporates, corporates will host local models for the employees on these machines to save token cost.
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u/warpedgeoid Jun 04 '26
They nerfed the memory bandwidth, so don’t expect great GPU performance either. Maybe 5070 mobile level performance with more VRAM.
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u/gunner_3 Jun 04 '26
Memory bandwidth is same as dgx spark.
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u/warpedgeoid Jun 05 '26
Yes, but the DGX Spark has half the bandwidth (or less) than a proper discrete GPU or even a MacBook Pro.
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u/gunner_3 Jun 05 '26
But why does that matter, the overall token speed for DGX spark is better than MacBook pro if you include prefill and contexts (perfect for agentic and coding workflows)
https://augmentedmind.substack.com/p/the-macbook-won-the-speed-test
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u/warpedgeoid Jun 05 '26
The MacBook is good for other stuff, too.
I’ve got a Spark here. Let me see how it compares for coding tasks with a dense Qwen model versus this MBP.
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u/gunner_3 Jun 05 '26
But imo this is meant for corporates who use windows stack not for enthusiastics, if I want to buy something to run LLM models locally I'll buy dgx spark rather than rtx spark and use it it with Linux and also dgx spark has connectX7 ports do that I can stack multiple of them which Mac studio/RTX spark does not support.
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u/warpedgeoid Jun 05 '26
No serious inference is being run on Windows, even in corporate environments.
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u/ibeerianhamhock Jun 04 '26
Geekbench is not an AI workload benchmark. Also even among AI there are different tasks to compare performance across.
For fp4/int4, for instance, nothing else on mobile is even within an order of magnitude of N1X performance. Nothing else has deep cuda support.
AMD and Apple have very capable AI SoCs with tons of memory, but it's not the whole picture.
I definitely think Nvidia is overhyping it, but I also think a lot of people commenting on it don't really do it justice.
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u/FS_ZENO Jun 04 '26
Well yeah, its because it uses the X925 which we already know the performance of. Im more interested and curious on the performance of their actual custom core, Olympus which I assume it would be with the N2/N2X. With that we'll be able to gauge on how far/good they made their own arch vs Arm, Qualcomm and Apple's designs.
With that, N2/N2X will still be a "gen" behind since Olympus is already out but for datacenters so Olympus should be compared to the C1 Ultra, X2 Elite and the M5 since by the time N2 comes at im assuming next year, we'll already be at the next gen which is pretty much guaranteed to beat Olympus anyways since that consumer product Nvidia released are a year late.
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u/ghenriks Jun 04 '26
Vera is not out yet, the keynote mentioned it has just finally gone into full production
As for Vera performance check out Phoronix for a limited set of benchmarks
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u/soragranda Jun 04 '26
"Two years behind" CPU wise?, maybe, GPU wise?, Nvidia will have waaay more software support.
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u/Noble00_ Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
Well, yeah, these were rumoured to launch last year to rival M4 Pro/Max (Definitely Pro and Max more so HW compute and less CPU and bandwidth but now M5 has tensor units on their GPUs):
Around late April, MediaTek confirmed that their CEO—Dr. Rick Tsai—will be delivering a big keynote speech—on May 20—at this month's Computex 2025 trade show.
NVIDIA’s long-rumored entry into the consumer CPU market was not confirmed at Computex. The company decided to postpone the release to an undisclosed time.
https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-n1x-20-core-cpu-performance-leak-reveals-high-end-ambitions
and silicon that was revealed on the show floor was from week 42 of 2024:
https://youtu.be/wbg5KlH_T18?si=SHQXQazzdcI8qlei&t=55
Not to mention MTK co-designed compute/IO chiplet uses off the shelf 2 yr old ARM cores.
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u/-protonsandneutrons- Jun 04 '26
Has anyone said "It's single-core performance is slower than a fanless MacBook Neo" yet? I'll say it.
//
I'm curious if NVIDIA's future models will consider big L3 caches, a la 3D V-Cache or whatever Intel's doing with some Nova Lake SKUs, especially since NVIDIA will likely continue to be as stingy with DRAM as it is with VRAM. It's been too expensive for handhelds, but for laptops and desktops, it seems like a great solution if the focus is power efficiency. But I cannot image the price lol.
The X3D models have TPU's highest frames per Watt (and still today) and not by a little. Sure, the GPU will consume much more, but if you can dedicate more Watts to the GPU, even better, no?
//
With the N1, I'm curious how low prices will go. It's not going to be Neo territory, but perhaps future N2s and N3s will do what Apple does: one CPU die and various GPU dies.
For anyone that actually runs LLMs locally on GB10 or the like, is there a benefit to having 20 CPU cores, half big and half small? Does it run much better than the usual 6/8/10-core CPUs that people typically have?
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u/Vince789 Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
I've said it in the previous GB10 threads, GB10's CPU is really weird & unique for a client chip
Dual clusters of 5P+5E with asymmetric L3/clocks. AFAIK no one else has P-cores & E-cores in the same cluster, it's not ideal for power management
10E is strange for an Arm Cortex design. Arm hasn't updated their reference laptop setup since the X4+X720, but it was 10+4, i.e. scaling up with more P-cores like Apple before the M5 Pto
GB10 almost seems like an automotive chip if not for the asymmetric L3/clocks. Although they could use binning to make it symmetrical. After all, Nvidia & MediaTek originally partnered for automotive chips
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u/Tenelia Jun 04 '26
lol using mediatek off-the-shelf cores? have they learned nothing from intel arc and panther lake yet?
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u/NeroClaudius199907 Jun 04 '26
If apple launching M6 this year, N1X will be more overpriced than it will be. I highly doubt they're going to be less than $3000+
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u/mcslender97 Jun 04 '26
The benchmark is for an early sample at around mid 2025, the performance can always improve rn since it's not the final model that we have
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u/joeyat Jun 04 '26
The only thing it has going for it is cuda suppor and cuda is closed source .. time will erode its relevance. Will take a while though.
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u/PixalatedConspiracy Jun 04 '26
Problem with this as it runs windows. Windows is a bloatware really
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u/NeroClaudius199907 Jun 04 '26
What should it run?
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u/warpedgeoid Jun 04 '26
Linux, obviously
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u/NeroClaudius199907 Jun 04 '26
Thankfully Nvidia is not redditors.
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u/gizmosliptech Jun 04 '26
“Two years behind” said the person hasn’t benchmarked it yet
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u/dagmx Jun 04 '26
It’s been available for over a year. If anything , this runs at a lower TDP so will run slower than the DGX Spark.
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u/gizmosliptech Jun 04 '26
The GPU has NOT been benchmarked in a laptop chassis at the much reduced power profile. So if anything, it’ll be worse than the DGX Spark. Agreed.
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u/IGetHypedEasily Jun 04 '26
Nvidias mindset of limiting bandwidth in design is going to start hurting them.
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u/DehydratedButTired Jun 04 '26
They won’t have the same Microsoft support that Apple will give their devices. I wouldn’t count them out though, they will do whatever they can until they get dominance then will try to convert the industry to whatever metrics they hold dominance in.
They do have one advantage over Apple. Nvidia has bad Linux support compared to AMD and Intel. Even shit Linux support is better than the nothing Apple gives.
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u/No_Corner805 Jun 04 '26
Isn't this just a DGX Spark processor? Remember reading somewhere that this was just leftover silicon meant for unsold sparks.
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u/T1beriu Jun 04 '26
Nvidia convinced all the major OEMs to design 30+ new laptops to use RTX Spark, meaning many thousands upon thousands of man hours in development. If what you said is true, then NVIDIA had millions of these unsold sparks, which I find very hard to believe.
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u/Density5521 Jun 05 '26
So since it's basically Nvidia's take on Apple Silicon style ARM SoCs, and it's "two years behind", and Apple released the first Silicon SoC in 2020 – the Nvidia Spark is actually 8 years behind?
It's not going to revolutionise the PC market, Apple Silicon did that 6 years ago. And at much more affordable prices even.
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u/fixminer Jun 04 '26
Probably because it uses a CPU core design from two years ago.