Lenovo Leak Points To NVIDIA N1X Laptop Chip Ahead Of Computex
Smoke usually indicates a fire and there are plenty of smoke signals pointing to NVIDIA's rumored N1 and N1X chip plans, the latest of which comes from Lenovo. Over at one of the OEM's Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) sign-in portals, new entries referencing the unannounced NVIDIA chips have been spotted ahead of next week's Computex event. Does this mean a launch is imminent?
It very well could, especially considering this is far from the first time an N1/N1X chip has broken cover or been linked to a high profile OEM. Hot on the heels of CES in January, for example, a leaked shipping manifest highlighted a premium Dell 16 laptop with an OLED display and N1X hardware with an "ES2" designation, suggesting at the time that it was based on second-generation engineering silicon.
More recently (as in, last month), a laptop motherboard sporting an N1 chip and 128GB of memory appeared on Goofish, a secondhand marketplace owned by China's Alibaba Group. The person who posted it described the items as an "NVIDIA N1 AI book engineering sample" that will "open a new era of Windows Arm."
We already know that NVIDIA has something up its sleeve. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang confirmed as much earlier this year while talking to Taiwanese media at the company's year-end wrap-up party in the region. While most of the details have yet to be revealed, Huang reportedly told press at the time that it's designing the chip in partnership with MediaTek and that it will feature "low power consumption but excellent performance."
Our suspicion is that N1/N1X will be based on the same design as teh GP10 Superchip found in NVIDIA's DGX Spark micro-workstation. How the N1 and N1X will differ from one another remains to be seen, but our guess is that the N1 will be a de-tuned variant, possibly with fewer cores, similar to what we see in chips like AMD's Ryzen Z2 and Ryzen Z2 Extreme silicon.
We're hoping to find out more concrete details soon, and Lenovo's updated portal (as spotted by Videocardz) suggests we will. For what it's worth, Lenovo's portal evidently points to a Legion 7 gaming laptop featuring NVIDIA's upcoming N1X chip, whereas past leaks also highlighted IdeaPad and Yoga models.
