Nvidia has unveiled a new superchip for personal computers, marking its first entry into the lucrative consumer market.
“This reinvention of the computer is as big a deal as the reinvention of the phone into what we now know as the smartphone,” Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang said, as he unveiled the RTX Spark chip at the Computex technology show in Taiwan on Monday.
‘Real game-changer’
Selling artificial intelligence chips used in enormous data centres has helped Nvidia become the world’s most valuable company, currently worth more than $5 trillion (£3.7 trillion). “Now it’s looking to put its technology in people’s homes,” said The New York Times’ Tripp Mickle.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Latest Videos From
The RTX Spark is a “new superchip for the era of personal AI agents – offering a new class of computer that moves from tool to teammate”, Nvidia said on its website.
Expected to be released in the autumn, it will power laptop and desktop computers from Dell, HP, Microsoft, Lenovo and others and is designed to run local AI systems that can sort files and quickly perform tasks.
The move into personal computing fires a “warning shot across the bow” of historic industry leaders such as AMD, Apple and Intel, said TechRadar, which described the move as a “real game-changer”.
Intel, Microsoft’s long-term partner, was once the “undisputed king of PCs”, but its performance has “slipped in key areas like battery life” in recent years, said Mickle. In 2021, Microsoft made it possible to run Windows software with processers from rival providers, creating an opportunity Nvidia has now exploited.
With the RTX Spark, the company will be hoping to move in on the growing market for AI computers that is currently dominated by Apple, which ditched Intel processors for its own hugely popular and powerful M-series chips in 2020.
“Apple more or less owns this market today,” Max Weinbach, a technology analyst at Creative Strategies, a tech research firm, told The New York Times. “Nvidia wants to build a laptop ecosystem for Windows that’s an alternative.”
An AI supercomputer in every home
The chip “lies at the heart of Nvidia’s push to embed AI directly into end-user devices, aiming to transform PCs into personal assistants which perform various tasks such as searching email, fixing coding bugs and accelerating generative AI features in software including Adobe Photoshop”, said Aqsa Qaddus Tahir on The News International.
Shohag Hossain, a digital creator, posted on X that the Nvidia-Microsoft partnership had “quietly built the hardware layer that makes AI run locally, privately, instantly, no cloud needed”. The result is your laptop “becomes an AI agent that works offline”, which means “no more sending your data to some server farm”.
“The real competition isn’t Apple vs Windows any more, it's who owns the AI that runs on your device.”
This new superchip could be the first step towards AI supercomputers becoming a common home appliance in the future, in the way that home theatres, large televisions, lawn mowers and dishwashers are not unusual, Huang told the conference in Taiwan.
“I could totally imagine someday there’s an AI supercomputer in your house,” he said. “It’s running all of your agents, it’s running all your assistants, and they’re doing all kinds of things for you all the time.”
