Nvidia’s RTX Spark sets up fight over the soul of Windows PCs

While Nvidia detailed some elements of the chip’s design and said they expect to deliver all-day battery life, they refused to offer up performance comparisons with existing devices. Photo by I-Hwa Cheng/AFP via Getty Images

Article content

The future of the personal computer is a hot topic again, courtesy of Nvidia Corp.’s announcement this week with Microsoft Corp. The leader in AI hardware is taking another run at making the central component for laptops, promising to bring the biggest change to the devices in decades.

Article content

Nvidia’s RTX Spark Superchip announcement overshadowed everything else at a particularly busy edition of the Computex trade show in Taipei. It dinged the stock prices of Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., lifted Nvidia partner MediaTek Inc., and set up a fascinating confrontation for this fall, when the first devices built with this technology go on sale.

Article content

Article content

Article content

The RTX Spark processor is the first in a line of new chips that Nvidia says will deliver the most optimized computers for artificial intelligence work — in the same way its products have become the backbone of AI data centres. The key difference compared with products from Intel and AMD is the ability to run large models on the device without reaching out to the internet.

Article content

Article content

“This appears less like a laptop launch than a bid to redefine AI PCs,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Steven Tseng. “Many so-called AI PCs currently available in the market still rely heavily on cloud AI, making them hard to distinguish from regular PCs with premium processors. Spark raises the bar by arguing that a true AI PC should be able to run AI agents locally.”

Article content

The company that scaled up graphics cards into a half-trillion-dollar infrastructure business intends to overhaul the Windows ecosystem as well, and at Computex it showed off its powers of attraction. Windows creator Microsoft is fully behind the new project, and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has every PC maker in the world joining in.

Article content

Article content

Lenovo Group Ltd., Dell Technologies Inc. and Taiwanese partners like Asustek Computer Inc. are all demonstrating RTX Spark devices in Taipei. Nvidia plans to have three versions of each generation — a laptop, a desktop and a workstation — and Huang spoke of his vision of putting an AI supercomputer in every home.

Article content

“Microsoft and Nvidia meticulously optimized everything,” Huang said during a keynote presentation on Monday.

Article content

The move to extend Nvidia’s reach beyond the data centre helps augment its developer ecosystem, and it also gives consumers something new bearing the Nvidia brand to buy.

Article content

The company said that initial versions of the computers will be in the “premium” tier of the market, but over time it will introduce cheaper versions that allow the company to address other parts of the market.

Article content

At an analyst event in Taiwan following his announcements, Huang told his audience the PC needs to fundamentally change from its current role as a tool that sits waiting for its owner to use it.

Article content

Future machines will be doing work all the time and choose to communicate with their users as an assistant. He likened them to Luke Skywalker’s trusty robot in Star Wars.