alt.hn

6/1/2026 at 4:45:20 AM

A powerful new chapter for Windows PCs, accelerated by Nvidia RTX Spark

 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2026/05/31/introducing-a-powerful-new-chapter-for-windows-pcs-accelerated-by-nvidia-rtx-spark/

by WalterSobchak

6/1/2026 at 8:48:40 AM

This reads as lip service for investors with no real life value. "Remember guys, we are still AI frontier material!"

by petterroea

6/1/2026 at 9:24:14 PM

Here's a fun game. Try and match the Microsoft statement to the OS version or year.

"A powerful new chapter"

"A major leap in graphics, performance, and usability"

"The most secure version of Windows ever"

"The most productive Windows ever"

"The Most Powerful Operating System Ever"

by 1970-01-01

6/2/2026 at 2:12:50 AM

haha i sure hope it's the newest Windows which is the most <good thing>

by petterroea

6/1/2026 at 2:37:09 PM

ai frontier -- on your PC!

which is terrifying

by red-iron-pine

6/1/2026 at 10:11:57 AM

Nvidia will have held back the thing you are really hoping for, whatever it is.

by wewewedxfgdf

6/1/2026 at 8:03:10 AM

Skimmed through the page no mention of what spark is. Is it a new ISA? SoC with CPU, GPU and NPU? Or just GPU+AI?

by adithyassekhar

6/1/2026 at 10:35:32 AM

It is the same CPU previously used in the overpriced DGX Spark.

It has 10 big Cortex-X925 cores, which are competitive with the Intel P-cores and with the AMD Zen cores, plus 10 small Cortex-A725 cores, which are similar in performance with the older Intel E-cores, from the Meteor Lake, Raptor Lake and Alder Lake generations. The current Intel E-cores are similar to Cortex-X4, i.e. they are much faster.

This Arm based CPU is more powerful that any Arm-based CPU previously used in a non-Apple PC, but in multi-threaded applications it is inferior to AMD Strix Halo CPUs.

The GPU of this is different from that of DGX, which was good only at ML/AI, but poor for graphics.

Here the GPU is likely to be good for graphics, and the top model will have up to 6144 FP32 execution units compared to 2560 of Strix Halo. But I assume that at least the top models will also be much more expensive than Strix Halo.

This NVIDIA CPU+GPU is limited to 128 GB of DRAM, while the successor of Strix Halo, which has been announced recently, offers up to 192 GB of DRAM, so NVIDIA continues its tradition of always providing less memory than its competitors, in order to have better profit margins.

by adrian_b

6/1/2026 at 8:13:22 AM

From somewhere in the middle of Nvidia’s endless press waffle:

“The RTX Spark superchip features an NVIDIA Blackwell RTX GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores and fifth-generation Tensor Cores with FP4 precision, connected via the NVIDIA NVLink®-C2C chip-to-chip interconnect to a high-performance, 20-core NVIDIA Grace™ CPU.

MediaTek, a market leader in Arm-based system-on-a-chip designs, collaborated with NVIDIA on the custom CPU design, contributing to its best-in-class power efficiency, performance and connectivity.“

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-microsoft-windows-...

Nvidia Grace is an ARM core.

by fredoralive

6/1/2026 at 9:01:52 AM

Sooooo they binned all their old DGX Spark crap to pawn on poor clueless consumers to try to be an ARM fighter and probably still fail miserably behind Apple Silicon and even likely older Qualcomm metal running Windows.

And Mediatek? Oof. I assume the SOC comes pre compromised out of the box.

by kotaKat

6/1/2026 at 10:11:40 AM

> And Mediatek? Oof. I assume the SOC comes pre compromised out of the box.

If by compromised you mean “china bad”, mediatek is taiwanese not chinese. Same home as asus, asrock, tsmc, htc, acer, d link, adata, biostar, insyde, gskill, foxconn, realtek and many others. From the chip to bios in your pc probably.

If you mean quality, they make efficient and more powerful chipsets especially gpu wise compared to qualcomm. Most probably only know it from cheap chinese phones.

by adithyassekhar

6/1/2026 at 10:49:56 AM

MediaTek used to supply a lot of lower-performance MIPS and ARM chips during 2010s. GP probably has that MediaTek == bad experience association. The actual chips weren't unreliable or horribly engineered, just slow, but people don't make a clear distinction there.

by numpad0

6/1/2026 at 11:45:08 AM

Sure but MediaTek isn't making the actual CPU, they're just making the unimportant parts of the chipset, who cares

by anaisbetts

6/1/2026 at 11:19:35 AM

MediaTek may of caught up, but they're still associated with inefficient Chinese junk.

by ChocolateGod

6/1/2026 at 12:32:41 PM

no, not calling "china bad", calling out all the SOCs they had some pretty glaring exploit holes on that a bunch of stupid OEMs kept shipping long after the holes were well known. i've also had a pretty bad time with a lot of their wifi chipsets on our networks, but hey.

by kotaKat

6/1/2026 at 1:30:00 PM

That is true. But to be fair, the exploits needed physical access to the device and Qualcomm also had their fair share of those issues. I believe actually trust worthy companies who ship both chips did actually fix those issues.

It’s the no name brands. And those are all odm devices which mtk already sold off. Talking about MT65xx era where you didn’t even need to unlock the bootloader for a flash.

by adithyassekhar

6/1/2026 at 2:56:29 PM

That’s your interiorised racism talking, bro.

Mediatek used to make a lot of low-quality cpus for cheap and short-lifespanned products (eg: those cheap tablets that are essentially useless as soon as they hit the market)

by znpy

6/1/2026 at 9:05:30 AM

It’s kind of irrelevant that they might be behind apple silicon because they’re targeting the non-apple, windows-using, section of the laptop market with a chip that can ostensibly be used for running AI models locally. Whether there’s much appetite for business users doing that remains to be seen.

by gizajob

6/1/2026 at 4:22:54 PM

The problem isn’t the chip. The problem is Windows and the level of Microsoft support going forward and right now Microsoft is preoccupied/distracted with Copilot.

That is the main problem that Qualcomm having currently with Microsoft.

by Danox

6/1/2026 at 11:44:02 AM

It's an ARM64 CPU with a nVidia GPU rather than garbage Adreno, not bad

by anaisbetts

6/1/2026 at 8:04:55 AM

As best as I can tell its something like the Apple M series SoC, but for Windows: CPU + GPU with unified memory.

It has 6,144 CUDA cores is similar to a RTX 4070 (5,888) but a lot less than a 4090 (16,384), but what it does have is support for FP4.

When they claim "1 Petaflop AI compute", thats what they mean. For comparison, a RTX 4090 has ~1.3 Petaflops of FP8 processing.

The second big deal is the NVLink-C2C interconnect, which provides up to 900 GB/s of bidirectional bandwidth between GPU and CPU. For comparison, the Apple M4 has 120 GB/s and the M3 Ultra has 819 GB/s. Notably, the Apple M series does not have FP4 support, so this could mean a significant performance improvement over Apple's offerings.

by MrBuddyCasino

6/1/2026 at 9:05:48 AM

I don't understand why this isn't bigger news - this is a laptop SoC with actual gaming hardware running on ARM - unlike Apple's M series, which tend to have rather underwhelming perf in games compared to what the specs would suggest, finally we can have a thin-and-light with an efficient gaming GPU.

Considering how much Valve invested into ARM emulation, it's quite possible the next Steam Deck/handheld will use a variation of this (or at least there will be one using this as the SoC).

by torginus

6/1/2026 at 10:52:34 AM

It's seeming to be going to be an another DGX Sparks that aren't so faster than maxed out Mac Studio, nor cheaper than 4x Blackwell on a workstation, nor cloud tokens. That's why.

by numpad0

6/1/2026 at 9:44:50 AM

Well, we don't have any information on cost, battery life or performance yet, which all matter. Could very well run laps around the M series at half the battery life and twice the cost.

by bigtex

6/1/2026 at 4:28:51 PM

Doubtful the slug in the room is Microsoft’s actual support see Qualcomm’s experience, not what Microsoft says in a media guide but what their actual support is when the hardware hits the street.

by Danox

6/1/2026 at 4:45:32 PM

I just want a new NVIDIA Shield Pro; can't believe that 7 year old device is still the best media player on the market.

by gigel82

6/1/2026 at 5:00:00 PM

Copilot++ PC?

by steve1977

6/1/2026 at 11:12:19 AM

Just a bunch of nonsense text strung together.

“Top agentic and AI developer workloads like GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, ComfyUI, Cursor and more now run across all modern PC silicon – making Windows the ideal platform for AI-assisted development”

None of these tools make use of local GPU whatsoever.

by skywhopper

6/1/2026 at 1:10:02 PM

> None of these tools make use of local GPU whatsoever.

You can use local models with most of those, you’d just need to get something like Ollama, LM Studio or vLLM working - but that’s the boring and not flashy part, it’s probably easier to name the dev tools.

Copilot: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/copilot-cli/custo... (also worked in Visual Studio Code)

Claude Code: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/model-config (here’s an example of a custom config in the wild with DeepSeek, same principle for local connection https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/agent_integrations/clau...)

Cursor: couldn’t find official docs but here’s z.AI docs https://docs.z.ai/devpack/tool/cursor (same principle for local API)

by KronisLV

6/1/2026 at 11:52:44 AM

And you better be sure that I'm setting up linux on this. Windows is not the ideal platform for anything anyway.

by Oxodao

6/1/2026 at 11:36:53 AM

> ComfyUI

Nitpick, but I remember running it specifically because there was a way to run LLMs on local hardware.

by akazantsev

6/1/2026 at 11:16:13 AM

[dead]

by cap11235

6/1/2026 at 11:08:53 AM

[dead]

by pascal220

6/1/2026 at 12:48:50 PM

A Ryzen 9 laptop with 24GB of RAM and a 5070 is £1200. This thing better be dirt cheap. Basically add the price of the RAM, and deduct the price of having to use ARM and being forced into a Windows ecosystem. So what's that total? £1500 to £2000 depending on who you ask? Who is this for? Not gamers, not average Windows users, not professional developers or content creators.

Thing is, hardly any games are optimized for ARM. And no serious AI development occurs on Windows.

I understand that you want multiple models running concurrently, but then 128GB is starting to look cramped.

It's a bold move that goes one to one against Apple and AMD Strix Halo.

I'm looking at it and thinking, if it can run Linux at a fair price it could be great.

I'm curious. I am thinking, what does a non developer buy this thing, take it home, and do with it.

What does the unboxing and first 24 hours look like?

A mixture of emotions somewhere between thinking you are living in the future, and frustration at not actually being able to do much.

The target audience seems like wealthy early adopters, but that is about it.

I guess we shall see.

by quatonion

6/1/2026 at 1:55:21 PM

> but then 128GB is starting to look cramped.

Indeed. This NVIDIA CPU will have a lifetime overlapping with the successor of Strix Halo, which has been announced recently and which increases the maximum amount of DRAM to 192 GB.

The Strix Halo CPU has better multi-threaded performance than this, so the only advantage of NVIDIA is that the top variants will have a bigger GPU than Strix Halo and its successor, but I assume that the variants with a bigger GPU will also be much more expensive.

by adrian_b

6/1/2026 at 2:50:09 PM

An M5 pro max with 128gb of RAM is $5200 so I’d expect some kind of price in that range.

I imagine it’s for AI researchers, professionals who work with models. Software engineers who want local models instead of cloud models.

To be honest, I don’t think it’ll be very popular with those demographics. But I think a company like Microsoft investing in local AI is a good thing.

by benbayard

6/1/2026 at 4:37:22 PM

Look to be disappointed Microsoft is all in on Copilot AI after having spent billions of dollars. It is boom or bust for Satya Nadella.

by Danox