NVIDIA And MediaTek May Be Teaming Up On A Powerful New Laptop Gaming Chip

This story is a bit odd but potentially huge, so sit up and pay attention to this one carefully. You may have read previously about NVIDIA's Project DIGITS, which was formally renamed to DGX Spark back in March at GTC. It's a tiny mini-PC that sports a chip known as GB10, which integrates "a high-performance 20-core Arm CPU" and a Blackwell GPU, alongside 128GB of unified memory. The story is that NVIDIA and Mediatek may be bringing that chip, or something very similar to it, to laptops as well.

This rumor originates with Taiwanese outlet UDN Money, who reports that a "compilation of interviews" has revealed NVIDIA's plans to "enter the gaming laptop market." Specifically, the site reports that NVIDIA and Mediatek are collaborating with Alienware on gaming laptops based on an "APU". According to UDN Money, this unknown processor draws just 65W of power, and yet offers the same performance level in games as a GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU.


If "50-100W APU about as fast as an RTX 4070" sounds familiar, that's because that's exactly what AMD's Ryzen AI MAX processors are. Codenamed Strix Halo, those parts pair up to sixteen Zen 5 CPU cores with a massive RDNA 3.5 GPU fed by a double-wide 256-bit memory bus. It still uses LPDDR5X memory, so the per-pin transfer rate is relatively low, but the wide memory bus means that the chip can actually offer very competitive gaming performance in 1080p and 1440p with upscaling.


So saying, this concept of an NVIDIA APU is obviously not unknown to us. The GB10 exists; people have them. It really is quite similar to Strix Halo in that it is a chiplet processor with a surprising number of CPU cores and a huge GPU, fed by a 256-bit LPDDR5X memory bus. NVIDIA's claims for compute performance on GB10 far outstrip the capabilities of Strix Halo, but NVIDIA loves its "CEO math", and in any case, compute throughput is virtually irrelevant for gaming.


It's not clear whether these new laptops would run Windows for Arm like the Copilot+ PCs based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite processors, or if they would instead prefer Linux. Gaming in Linux on Arm isn't as insane as it sounds; in fact, it's actually more or less a turn-key process thanks to the work of Valve and Ampere as well as many other contributors. However, there's still a performance hit from ISA translation when running x86-64 games, whether you're on Windows or Linux, which means that these systems would likely target games with native Arm versions, and that mostly means Android titles.

The DGX Spark is extremely expensive at around $3,000, but it has many elite features that would not need to exist for a hypothetical gaming system based on the same SoC. For starters, the 200-Gigabit Connect-X7 network interface is absolutely unnecessary and would surely be excised. It's also likely that any consumer-tier systems based on this chip would come with considerably less than 128GB of local memory, at least as an option.


While this rumor seems very odd on the face of it, this isn't the first time we've actually heard this story. In fact, last week notorious leaksman Tom at Moore's Law is Dead published the image above, which he says is of an engineering sample of an NVIDIA chip specifically targeted at gaming laptops. However, the engineering sample version specifically targets a power budget of 80 to 120 watts—exactly the top-end of the AMD Strix Halo TDP range. Curiouser and curiouser.


Tom and his guest Wendell from Level1Techs discuss the idea of this chip and wonder which came first: Digits/DGX Spark, or the plans for these supposed consumer-level laptops. It's an interesting discussion, but we won't spoil it here; you can click to watch the video above if you're interested. UDN Money and MLiD agree that these parts will likely be announced around CES 2026.