Nvidia recently officially released its new Arm architecture processor RTX Spark at the GTC 2026 conference in Taipei, with the internal code name N1X. It is positioned to re-invent Windows personal computers in the "intelligent era". This chip can be equipped with up to 128GB of unified memory, natively supports various AI Agents, integrates NVIDIA's complete graphics technology stack, and emphasizes high energy efficiency. Microsoft’s latest Surface Laptop Ultra is one of the first devices to feature RTX Spark, and is billed by Microsoft as the most powerful laptop ever.
At the meeting, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang called RTX Spark "the most amazing chip the world has ever built" and claimed that it would "theoretically take 33 years" to build such a chip, on the grounds that 100% of NVIDIA's software stack can run on it, including local AI, DLSS, CUDA, etc. He said that whether it is digital biology calculations or computer graphics-related workloads, N1X can handle it. Huang Renxun also revealed that Nvidia's attempts to "reinvent the PC" have been going on for many years. Microsoft and Nvidia have been working together for the past three years to build this Arm processor and AI native platform in order to come up with a complete solution at this point in time.
The question that the outside world is most concerned about is whether this Arm processor can run existing Windows applications smoothly, especially in the context that the Windows on Arm ecosystem is still developing. In this regard, Huang Renxun gave an extremely radical statement in his speech, saying that RTX Spark can run "every application NVIDIA has ever built, and every application Windows has ever run." He said that Microsoft and Nvidia have carefully optimized every aspect of the system so that this computer can "run almost everything that has been created in the world" and have introduced native support for AI Agents on this basis.
However, NVIDIA has not yet disclosed RTX Spark’s CPU running scores or more detailed technical parameters, and its actual performance under traditional applications, games, and AI loads is still unknown to the outside world. From the available information, Nvidia appears to be leaving specific performance numbers to OEMs, with testing and more details expected to be revealed later this year. In the hardware circle, many people believe that the current publicity around this chip is more about rhetoric and vision, and lacks sufficient data support. Therefore, it is too early to draw conclusions about the overall strength of RTX Spark.
Nonetheless, from an application compatibility perspective, Huang Jen-Hsun’s statement about “running all Windows applications” is not completely out of touch with reality. In the past few years, thanks to Qualcomm's continued investment and Microsoft's improvements at the system level, the Windows on Arm application ecosystem has made significant progress. Currently, a large number of mainstream applications already offer native Arm versions, including professional software such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Adobe Premiere Pro, Blender and DaVinci Resolve. In addition, some popular games (such as "Fortnite") have also been optimized for Arm PC and run smoothly in the Windows on Arm environment.
For traditional x86 applications that do not yet natively support Arm, Microsoft provides solutions through the "Prism" emulation layer. Prism dynamically translates your application's x86 instructions into Arm64 instructions at runtime, allowing it to run on Arm hardware such as RTX Spark with a near-native experience. In actual testing, professional tools like AutoCAD Electrical can already work normally on Windows Arm64 through Prism.
More importantly, Windows 11 has added support for AVX and AVX2 instruction set extensions to the Arm platform in the 2025 update, allowing more applications and games that rely on these extensions to run smoothly through emulation. Ableton Live, a digital audio workstation that is popular among music creators but does not yet have a native version of Windows 11 Arm64, is a typical example: it could not be started through Prism initially due to its reliance on specific x86 instruction extensions, but after Windows 11 introduced AVX/AVX2 for Arm, it can be used normally in the emulation environment. Microsoft has also successively pushed support for other related x86 extensions such as BMI and F16C for Windows on Arm, further broadening the scope of simulation compatibility.
Judging from the current situation, the application compatibility of Windows 11 on the Arm platform is no longer a "fatal shortcoming" unless users have professional scenario needs such as Android Studio that are highly dependent on complex virtualization and specific instruction sets. In these extreme development environments, there are still cases where the experience is poor or even impossible to run. However, for most daily office, creative production and entertainment users, the system's native and emulated combination can already cover most needs.
Based on this ecological foundation, NVIDIA and Microsoft are now launching a new generation of Windows on Arm platform with RTX Spark (N1X) as the core, trying to further push PCs into the direction of "AI native" and "full-stack unified". However, before real equipment and third-party evaluation data are made public, whether RTX Spark can reach the advertised heights in terms of performance, compatibility, and energy efficiency remains to be tested by the market.