The best reason to care about Nvidia’s RTX Spark: ‘everything’ will run on Arm
Nvidia is launching its new RTX Spark laptops, which utilize Arm-based chips to run a wide range of Windows applications. While the company claims these devices offer seamless performance for all software, early reviews suggest high costs and potential trade-offs compared to cloud-based AI.
Why it matters
This marks a significant shift in the PC market as Nvidia attempts to bridge the gap between high-performance AI hardware and the compatibility requirements of traditional Windows users.
Fourteen years ago this month, Microsoft released an Nvidia-powered Windows PC that would become one of the greatest tech flops in modern history. The original Microsoft Surface, which ran a stripped-down version of Windows on an Nvidia Tegra chip, bombed so hard that Microsoft had to write off $900 million in inventory.
The problem was that Nvidia’s Arm chip couldn’t run existing Windows apps. Buyers had to leave their legacy programs behind.
This Friday, October 16th, Nvidia will once again be at the heart of Arm-powered Windows PCs with the first wave of RTX Spark laptops. But now, the company says, they’ll run everything. Adobe. Office. Blender. Even games that require kernel-level anti-cheat.
“All your apps, all your games, everything’s going to run great on Spark,” Nvidia senior director of products Justin Walker told journalists last week.
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