Nvidia is no longer content with graphics cards; the company is reportedly about to launch its own ARM-based chip for laptops.
At the end of last year, we learned that Nvidia was close to launching its first chip based on the ARM architecture to power our laptops dedicated to video games. According to Taiwanese media United Daily News, the first products incorporating this component should soon be available on the market.
Alienware laptops powered by this Nvidia APU could be available as early as the end of this year, or by early 2026 at the latest. In 2024, Michael Dell, CEO of Dell (Alienware's parent company), suggested that Dell laptops specializing in AI could be released in 2025 thanks to a partnership with Nvidia. The undisputed leader in dedicated graphics cards, Nvidia should soon be entering the ARM PC market.
Can Nvidia make ARM PCs attractive to gamers?
The Greens are reportedly working with MediaTek to create this APU (a chip that combines the CPU and GPU). One of the challenges is making the Blackwell GPU architecture compatible with ARM technologies. The YouTube channel Moore's Law is Dead recently published an image of the supposed Nvidia APU, which could deliver a power output of between 80 and 120 W. Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite, its only serious competitor (outside of Apple) at the moment, officially goes up to 80W, but can be pushed to its limits up to 100W.
The gaming experience on Windows laptops running Snapdragon ARM is, to say the least, unstable. Performance is far from what you can get with the traditional combination of an x86 CPU architecture and a dedicated graphics card. Beyond the purely hardware aspect, the fact that most games don't support ARM and must be emulated with Windows' native Prism service is a major obstacle. It will be interesting to see what Nvidia has in store to overcome this challenge and do better than Qualcomm.
ARM-based laptops have the advantage of being thinner, lighter, and less resource-intensive. They are popular in a professional or productivity setting, but much less so for gaming, but that could change. In addition to Nvidia, AMD and MediaTek are developing their own ARM chips for computers.
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