Nvidia RTX Spark ‘Superchip’: The First AI PCs Are Here

Luke Larsen got a first look at Lenovo's Yoga 9n 2-in-1 at IFA, three months after Nvidia unveiled the RTX Spark superchip. The 16-inch machine is 0.69 inches thick — 0.03 inches off a 16-inch MacBook Pro — with a 2880x1800 120Hz OLED touch display, six speakers, and a 9.2-megapixel webcam. Inside is Nvidia's Arm SoC: a Grace CPU with up to 20 cores and a Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 6,144 cores, CPU, GPU, and memory on one package. Larsen notes that core count alone would put the iGPU somewhere between a laptop RTX 5070 Ti and 5080. Lower-powered configs are implied. There were no battery-life claims.

The Yoga 9n tops out at 64GB of memory. The 15-inch Yoga Pro 9n, which Larsen did not handle, goes to 128GB, is 0.66 inches at its thinnest, and adds a Force Pad that takes a stylus. Other Spark laptops named: Dell XPS 16, Asus ProArt P16, Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra, and one 14-inch, the HP OmniBook X 14. Acer showed an SFF RTX Spark mini PC, following Asus's ProArt Mini PC, both about Mac mini size, with a 'petaflop of AI performance' and up to 128GB. Lenovo also announced an AMD ThinkCentre X Ultra with Ryzen Max+ Pro 495 and 128GB, expected to start at $3,699 for the base model. Spark prices were not given. A 128GB MacBook Pro is $6,139.

This is the hardware half of Nvidia's local-AI pitch, and the missing number is the price. Larsen is right that RAM has never been more expensive or more necessary. A 64GB 2-in-1 that cannot load the models the 128GB Pro can is not an 'AI PC' in the sense Nvidia is selling. It is a thin Windows laptop with a Grace-Blackwell badge.

The MacBook comparison is the whole frame. Thickness, speakers, webcam, Arm SoC with unified memory — Nvidia is done pretending discrete-GPU Windows notebooks are the competitor. The AMD ThinkCentre at $3,699 is the only honest analog on the page. If Spark mini PCs land in that band, local agents become a luxury-goods problem. If they land closer to a Mac mini, PAIR and OpenClaw have somewhere to live.

Signal Desk's read: Spark is Nvidia trying to own the client the way it owns the rack, before Apple's M6 mini and M5 Ultra Studio, and before AMD's 128GB desktop kits, become the default local box. The first-look machines are creator 16-inchers. The 14-inch HP is the tell that Nvidia still does not have a thin-and-light story. Until prices and battery numbers exist, 'the first AI PCs' is a slogan hanging off a chip announcement from three months ago.

Demand for OpenClaw-style local agents is real. Whether anyone pays MacBook-Pro-plus-RAM prices for a Windows Arm box that also plays EA and Ubisoft titles is the IFA question Nvidia left on the table.

Nvidia unveiled RTX Spark in the summer as a Grace-plus-Blackwell superchip for client machines. IFA is the first time press handled the laptops and saw OEM mini PCs. Apple refreshed the Mac mini and Mac Studio with AI-oriented chips a week earlier.