NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang Tips Hand On N1 AI PC Chip Plans

When you think NVIDIA, you think "GPUs." It's easy to forget that NVIDIA's been making system-on-a-chip products for nearly 20 years; the first Tegra SoC came out in early 2008. The company's chips haven't really found their way into mainstream laptops, but that's about to change with the release of the N1/N1X processors.

Speaking to Taiwanese media at NVIDIA Taiwan's year-end wrap-up party, Huang made a few remarks about the upcoming chips. It's not much we haven't heard, but he emphasized the power efficiency of the new parts, reportedly claiming that the chips will feature "low power consumption but excellent performance." He also reaffirmed that the processors are produced in partnership with Mediatek; that firm designed the Arm-based CPU chiplet, while NVIDIA brings its GPU expertise to the chips.


As we've reported several times before, the N1/N1X appear to be based on the very same design as the "GB10 Superchip" featured in the DGX Spark micro-workstation. It's actually not at all clear what the difference between the N1 and N1X is, nor how they differ (if at all) from the GB10. Our best guess is that the N1 will be a slightly detuned version, and it's also quite possible that both chips will feature fewer CPU cores given the emphasis on gaming, which rarely benefits from more than a handful of CPU cores.

The GB10 Superchip itself features a 10+10 big.LITTLE CPU configuration as well as a relatively large Blackwell-based GPU with 48 shader modules. On paper, that puts it as a close cousin to the GeForce RTX 5070, which is a lot of firepower for integrated graphics. Of course, it's held back in gaming by a shared LPDDR5X memory bus that can't possibly hope to feed such a powerful GPU—but that's exactly why the N1/N1X could make sense as cut-down versions.

If the emphasis is on power efficiency, an SoC actually makes a lot of sense for gaming. Handhelds like the ASUS ROG Ally X and MSI Claw 8 AI+ are able to deliver outstanding gaming performance on 30W specifically because they eliminate the separate GPU and all of its associated hardware: PCI Express, dedicated power delivery, and the exclusive memory bus.


The question remains whether gamers will be interested in a gaming laptop that requires emulation to run PC games, and especially one with frankly middling performance compared to what will likely be similarly-priced traditional gaming laptops, if machines based on AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ are anything to go by. Especially with the ongoing memory shortage, NVIDIA's fighting an uphill battle with this product.

We already reported that laptops with NVIDIA's N1/N1X processors are expected in the first half of this year—quite possibly Q1—and this report from UDN Money doesn't do anything to change that. It will be fascinating to see if NVIDIA and its partners can position these new parts better than AMD has been able to price its very similar Ryzen AI Max chips.