At Computex 2026, an annual computer trade show held in Taipei, Taiwan, Nvidia made a long anticipated announcement—a version of the company’s Blackwell GB10 superchip for Windows PCs, called RTX Spark. Originally rumored to launch in 2025, it was finally introduced at this year’s show.

It came with full support from Microsoft, which announced two new devices powered by RTX Spark: the Surface Laptop Ultra and the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box. Asus, Dell, Lenovo, HP, and MSI also announced Windows PCs with RTX Spark.

If this is triggering déjà vu, that’s for good reason. In June 2024, Qualcomm and Microsoft partnered to launch AI-focused Copilot+ PCs. Qualcomm’s Arm-based chips provided an alternative to x86-based chips from AMD and Intel used across dozens of budget and mid-range Windows laptops. It was met with mixed commercial success, however, and Intel remains the dominant supplier of chips for Windows laptops. But that doesn’t mean RTX Spark will follow the same path, as Nvidia’s involvement is an important part of the equation.

“Nvidia just has more clout and more industry weight to push and make things happen that Qualcomm couldn’t do early on, and that even Microsoft struggled with,” says Ryan Shrout, president at Signal65, a third-party testing firm. “They can get game developers on board and get software developers in the emerging AI space to pay attention.”

What is RTX Spark?

At its core, RTX Spark is an iteration of the hardware found in the DGX Spark mini-workstation, which was released in late 2025. Officially badged N1X, the silicon is Nvidia’s Blackwell GB10 “superchip,” a system-on-a-chip with 20 Arm CPU cores; 6,144 GPU cores; and support for up to 128 gigabytes of LPDDR5X memory.

There are some small differences between the mini-workstation and PC system, and the most significant is power consumption. The DGX Spark was designed for GB10 to operate with a power consumption up to 140 watts without overheating. RTX Spark laptops are likely to use less power, which may lower performance, though the details will depend on each PC maker’s particular implementation and remain to be seen.

RTX Spark will also include a neural processing unit (NPU) that qualifies the system for Microsoft’s Copilot+ certification. The NPU is used for some background AI features, like Windows Recall. However, the GPU will remain in the driver’s seat for active AI tasks, including large language models (LLMs) and image generation.

Though RTX Spark laptops took the spotlight, the news is also relevant to desktop workstations. Currently, DGX Spark ships with a custom version of Linux called DGX OS, not Windows. Nvidia says RTX Spark desktops with Windows are coming in the third quarter of 2026. Windows is also coming to Nvidia’s DGX Station, the full-sized desktop iteration of Nvidia’s hardware.

The launch of RTX Spark is, of course, in part an AI play, and that is taking the lion’s share of attention. But Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, thinks Spark is just as relevant for professional work and gaming. “I think the AI play is mostly to appease investors,” he says. “Creators and gamers are also excited about RTX Spark, and someone like me who does all three is even more excited, because having a machine that can do all three well has been a challenge.”

Nvidia’s advantage may lie in software

Though Nvidia refers to the GB10 as a “superchip,” it’s similar to other high-performance system-on-a-chip designs, such as Apple’s M-series silicon and AMD’s Ryzen AI Max. All three include a CPU, GPU, and NPU. All three support large amounts of DRAM. And all three have a unified memory architecture (meaning the system memory is a shared resource accessible to the CPU, GPU, and NPU).

The existing DGX Spark also provides a baseline for performance expectations. RTX Spark will likely deliver GPU performance similar to an RTX 5070 mobile GPU which, if correct, would put it ahead of Apple and AMD’s competing systems. On the other hand, GB10’s CPU cores aren’t as quick as the CPU cores found in leading competitors.

Nvidia’s biggest edge might stem not from hardware performance, but from software. The company’s GPUs are essentially the industry standard across gaming and professional work, with estimates placing Nvidia’s GPU market share above 90 percent. That in turn has made Nvidia the target for most software that benefits from a GPU.

“Nobody doubts that Nvidia is the leader in GPU capability and the software stack around it,” says Shrout. Sag agrees, explaining that Nvidia has the advantage of “extremely mature drivers.”

Microsoft touts AI, but Windows on Arm remains a question

Nvidia announced RTX Spark was in lockstep with Microsoft, which held its Build developer conference in San Francisco while Computex was taking place across the Pacific in Taipei.

Repeating the Copilot+ PC launch, Microsoft’s vision of Windows on the RTX Spark leans heavily on AI. But unlike Copilot+ PCs—which used the NPU to accelerate AI features integrated into the Windows user experience, such as quickly recalling anything you’ve opened or translating live video calls—the pitch for Windows running on RTX Spark seems more focused on using the Spark’s GPU to accelerate LLMs.

Microsoft announced an “early preview” of Windows SDK called Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), which sandboxes AI agents, allowing them to work autonomously while isolating them from functions the user doesn’t want the agent to access.

Still, the real test for both Nvidia and Microsoft remains the same challenge Microsoft and Qualcomm faced: establishing Windows on Arm PCs as an alternative to Windows PCs powered by x86 chips from Intel and AMD. Whether RTX Spark will succeed in this remains to be seen.

“Even with all of the talk from Nvidia and Microsoft about the future of the PC and revolutionizing the PC, everybody understands that it needs to be a great general-purpose PC first,” says Shrout.