Ask Paul: June 5 ⭐

Happy Friday! This was a particularly eventful week, especially for those interested in the future of Windows. Which, come to think of it, reminds me of a tagline from long ago. In any event, let's jump right in: As is so often the case, many of you seem to be interested in and wondering about the same things as me this week. And there are still so many questions. Starting with ...
💻 There are still far too many N1X questions
jrzoomer asks:

Paul, does the NVIDIA N1X hardware architecture feel like a classic high-performance gaming chip that Nvidia is simply rebranding with AI marketing to fit the current moment? Leaked roadmaps for the N1X/RTX Spark date back to at least 2024, back then local inference was touted as the next big thing but that never panned out–no one is running local AI workloads on laptops, everything is run on cloud. Given that the N1X is essentially a Blackwell RTX 5070 GPU (same exact 6144 CUDA cores) and a 20-core Arm CPU fused together (a weak one at that, as early benchmarks show the N1X CPU performing similarly to Apple’s M3 Max from 2023), its real strength seems to just be traditional gaming performance. So are these essentially gaming laptop SoCs?

Hm. I think the major pushback on this is the Arm architecture at the heart of the chips. Games are almost universally non-native on Arm, so they run under emulation, and that will always incur a hit. On Snapdragon X-based PCs, this experience can be good or even excellent, but key AAA titles like those in the Call of Duty series don't run at all, let alone slowly. Nvidia showed off some select games playing on the new hardware at Computex, and they of course looked great. And while it's reasonable to expect this experience to be better on these systems than on Snapdragon X because of the GPU, it's never going to be perfect.

Unless, of course, game makers begin targeting Arm as well as x86. And the hope here, no matter which architecture you prefer, is that Nvidia's influence triggers that important next step. Today, any mainstream premium laptop with a current-generation AMD or Intel processor can play most games very well, and higher-end SoCs (Panther Lake, for example, in the upper tiers) are terrific. So gaming will be fine on Nvidia-based laptops in the short term, I'm sure; there's a lot of work in Windows to help with that too. But we need the games to be native. And until that happens, these N1X-based laptops won't be top-tier experiences.

I feel like the real point of this hardware is to move the needle on local AI, and while the Copilot+ PC thing hasn't resonated with just about anyone, this is a rare example of Microsoft being ahead of the curve. Cloud-based AI continues to improve at a dramatic rate, but so too does local AI. And while it's unlikely those capability lines will ever cross on a graph, it's always been obvious that they will be "good enough" for most mainstream usage cases soon, and there's always the hybrid model where those who...