It seems that after months of silence regarding the collaboration between NVIDIA and Mediatek, we could soon see the launch of its Arm-based laptops. It’s been several years since the first rumors that NVIDIA and Mediatek were working together to develop an Arm-based SoC that could be used as a solution for multiple mobile applications ranging from laptops to gaming handhelds, and if the latest report from the Wall Street Journal (via VideoCardz) proves to be accurate, we may finally see it come to the consumer market.
“People familiar with NVIDIA’s supply chain said PC makers including Dell Technologies and Lenovo were working with the chip maker on models using the NVIDIA-Mediatek system-on-a-chip, which is built on architecture from U.K. chip designer Arm.”
– The Wall Street Journal
The report adds that the first models featuring the new SoC, which would feature an Arm-based CPU paired with NVIDIA-based RTX Grace Blackwell graphics and an NPU, will be launched in the first half of this year. There’ve already been leaks from Lenovo and Dell; it’s believed the package powering them is the N1/N1X processor, which is based on NVIDIA’s GB10 “Super Chip” found in its DGX Spark AI mini PC, which also means support for LPDDR5X memory. The scaled-down flagship N1X will supposedly feature a 48-core iGPU paired with a 20-core ARM64 CPU, which is a variation of the Cortex-X925 that is capable of up to 1,000 TOPS (FP4), but is designed for even greater power efficiency.
It remains to be seen how well these chips will run x86-based applications, as they are likely to use a version of the custom DGX Spark Linux OS that is based on Ubuntu, but given the resources of NVIDIA and Mediatek, the two could have made further modifications similar to what Steam has done with its Proton-based OS for the Steam Machine. Meanwhile, the only other major competitor in the laptop market to be using an ARM-based processor is Samsung. The electronics manufacturer continues to evolve its Snapdragon processors, which can run Windows applications and games with varying results via emulation, but overall performance is more of a case-by-case scenario than a point-and-click approach of expecting things to work as they would on an x86 system.