Apple silicon, Qualcomm ARM processors in Windows laptops, and now Nvidia’s RTX Spark. Is this the beginning of the end for the x86 architecture, which has dominated CPUs for the last 40-odd years?
The reality is much more nuanced. But it’s evident that the x86 architecture is facing its greatest challenge yet — at least on the consumer front. Because Nvidia’s new RTX Spark superchip, which Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced yesterday at his Computex keynote, takes the competing ARM architecture, which has mostly been used in mobile devices, to potentially new heights.
What the RTX Spark offers is a Windows alternative to Apple silicon. It brings together a MediaTek ARM-based CPU, Nvidia’s Blackwell RTX graphics and up to 128GB of high-speed unified memory. The result: A chip that’s said to be designed for Personal AI, basically AI agents running from local PCs instead of the cloud. The same graphics and processing power offered by the RTX Spark also makes it suitable for…
