Nvidia RTX Spark is a Game Changer ⭐

I was looking forward to IFA 2026 for all kinds of reasons, but the biggest, perhaps, was to finally see the Nvidia RTX Spark in person and see whether doing so would answer a few questions I have. Well, I have and it did. So let's go through what I've learned this week.

First, let's recap the history, as quickly as possible.

Nvidia is one of several companies rumored to be working on Arm chipsets for Windows PCs in the wake of Microsoft's 2017 deal with Qualcomm. But Microsoft and Qualcomm were inseparable for several years, with Qualcomm making small improvements to the phone-based chips it first adapted for PCs and Microsoft making many small improvements to the software over time. It's difficult to even process how much all this changed as we moved into the Windows 11 era, Qualcomm acquired Nuvia, and Microsoft dramatically improved its Prism emulator, but with the launch of the first Snapdragon X-based Copilot+ PCs in mid-2024, the impossible happened, the miracle of reliability, performance, compatibility, efficiency, and battery life that is Windows 11 on Arm as we know it today.

But once Microsoft and Qualcomm did pull off this miracle, the rumor mill churned up once again. Some claimed that the two had a several year exclusivity agreement. And we heard that companies like AMD, MediaTek, Nvidia, and Samsung were interested in getting in on this Windows on Arm market in various permutations over time. By the time Qualcomm started talking up its Snapdragon X2 chipsets, Nvidia, or Nvidia and MediaTek partnered together, had emerged as the front-runners in the sweepstakes to be Qualcomm's first PC-based competitors.

And then it finally happened. In June, Microsoft and Nvidia announced the new family of "superchips" called RTX Spark. These are Arm-based chips with integrated Blackwell RTX graphics cores and up to 128 GB of unified RAM that will power yet another new kind of AI PC and target a diverse set of high-end local AI workloads that Microsoft (and Qualcomm) completely ignored with the NPU-focused Copilot+ PCs. But it is interesting to me that even that initial announcement specifically mentioned that RTX Spark is "purpose-built for creators, gamers and AI developers in the personal AI era."

Gamers? That's interesting because gaming is the only real compatibility issue with Snapdragon X and X2-based PCs. Not because of any real shortcoming with the hardware, per se, but because all major PC-based games are written for x86, not Arm, so they run in emulation on the latter. This is fine for productivity and creativity apps, and with the X2 in particular, it can be OK for many games, too. But the experience is hit or miss, and that uncertainty is a big problem. And no game makers even hinted that they were interested in porting their games to Arm.

As all this was happening, we were witnessing a miracle of another kind over in the x86 world. No, not improved reliability, that seems especially elusive to Intel and AMD on...