Nvidia Corp yesterday unveiled the company’s first chip to power a new breed of laptops on Microsoft Corp’s operating system, addressing growing demand for agentic artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities on edge devices for consumers.
During the company’s GTC event in Taipei, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) announced a series of Windows-based laptops that use its new RTX Spark chip, known internally as the N1X chip, featuring a Blackwell RTX graphics processing unit (GPU).
The N1X, a custom 20-core Grace central processing unit (CPU), is built in partnership with chip designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科), and produced utilizing Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (台積電) 3-nanometer process technology, Huang said.
Photo: Ann Wang, Reuters
It took more than three years for Microsoft and Nvidia to completely reinvent how the PC is going to work, Huang said.
“The PC is being reinvented” for creating and gaming, Huang said. “When it has an autonomous [AI] agent, an agent that’s helping you, that understands you, you could talk to it. It could look at you. You could ask it to read files, go help you do some research. It could do a lot more,” he said.
“Local agents. Frontier models. Creative workflows. RTX games. All on a laptop. This is the new PC. The personal AI computer,” he said, describing it as the first major reinvention of the PC in four decades.
Microsoft said in a separate statement that the PCs running on Nvidia’s RTX superchips would be able to support “highly capable AI models” and complex workloads.
RTX Spark laptops and compact desktops that run Microsoft’s Windows for Arm architecture would be available this fall from leading manufacturers including Asustek Computer Inc (華碩), Dell Technologies Inc, HP Inc, Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想), Microsoft Surface and Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星), with models from Acer Inc (宏碁) and Gigabyte Technology Co (技嘉) to follow.
Huang also said that the company’s new Vera CPUs for data centers are in full production and are “going to be our new major growth driver” on the back of the AI agent boom, with early customers expected to include Anthropic PBC, OpenAI and SpaceXAI.
However, a major theme of the nearly two-hour speech was the idea that AI agents could eventually become a form of digital labor.
“There’ll be a lot more agents than there are people,” Huang said, predicting that billions of AI agents would one day operate across businesses, industries and households.
Huang said he expects future AI systems to do far more than answer questions. Equipped with memory, reasoning capabilities and the ability to use software tools, they would increasingly perform tasks on behalf of users, functioning more like digital workers than chatbots.
Huang said he could envision “an AI supercomputer in your house” running multiple agents and assistants around the clock.
Such systems could help users conduct research, complete work assignments and manage everyday activities, he said.
Additional reporting by AP and CNA
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