Your next laptop may have Nvidia inside – not in the form of a GPU, but as a system on a chip, complete with CPU. Team Green could be chipping away at Intel's marketshare and giving people Arm-based systems that compete with Apple's MacBook line.
Last fall, major OEMs including Dell, Lenovo, HP, Asus, MSI and Gigabyte began shipping Linux workstations powered by a custom Nvidia processor rather than the usual fare of Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm chips. The question since then has been when will we see the chip or something like it in a machine that doesn't cost $3,000-$4,000 and, critically, can actually run Windows.
According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal citing sources familiar with the matter, we may not have to wait much longer for a consumer-focused system on chip (SoC) from Nvidia, with Dell and Lenovo reportedly planning systems, including notebooks, for later this year.
Nvidia's GB10 SoC launched in October as part of a collaboration between MediaTek and Nvidia. The first systems were AI workstations from Nvidia, Dell, Asus, MSI, Gigabyte and others. The chip features a CPU tile designed by MediaTek which features a "big/little" architecture with 10 Arm X925 cores and 10 A725 for a total of 20. So, the CPU itself is not made by Nvidia.
In testing, we found that the chip delivered CPU performance within 10 to 15 percent of AMD's top-specced Strix Halo mobile processors in most workloads.
This CPU tile is bonded to an Nvidia-developed GPU tile with specs on par with the company's 5070 desktop GPUs, with the company boasting up to a petaFLOP of AI performance at FP4 with sparsity. Though, as we noted in our review, users shouldn't expect to get anywhere near that in real-world applications.
That level of graphics performance isn't free, as the chip is rated for 140 watts under load, which is roughly 3x what you'd expect from an SoC aimed at high-end thin-and-lite laptops today and more in line with what'd you'd expect from a gaming notebook.
These compute tiles are fed by a 128 GB of LPDDR5x and a 200 Gbps ConnectX-7 Ethernet networking card, neither of which are features most mainstream customers necessarily need or want to pay for.
Beyond a price tag in the $3,000 to $4,000 range, the GB10's bigger problem is that none of the systems based on it officially run Windows, instead shipping with a lightly-customized version of Ubuntu 24.04 Linux tailored to machine learning research and development.
So, while technically speaking Nvidia is already shipping SoCs to both Dell and Lenovo, they're not exactly targeted at mainstream consumers.
Having said that, such a foray wouldn't be out of character for the GPU giant. Nvidia Tegra SoCs have previously powered tablets and handheld gaming consoles like the Nintendo switch.
If you think back to the mid-to-late 2000s, Nvidia graphics were common on consumer devices including notebooks. In those days the lightweight GPUs were baked into the motherboard rather than the CPU.
Today, integrated graphics is largely an untapped market for Nvidia. Sure, you can get notebooks with Nvidia graphics on board, but these tend to be thicker, heavier gaming-focused systems.
"There's an entire segment of the market where the CPU and the GPU are integrated. It's integrated for form factor reasons, maybe it's for cost reasons, maybe it's for battery life reasons, all kinds of different reasons. And that segment has been largely unaddressed by Nvidia today," CEO Jensen Huang said late last summer. "That segment of the market is really quite rich, and it's really quite large, and it's underserved today."
Regardless of whether the company ever brings a GB10-style SoC to notebooks, we will soon see Intel-based processors with Nvidia graphics on board.
Announced as part of Nvidia's $5 billion investment in Intel back in September, the collab will see Intel pair its CPU tiles with Nvidia-engineered GPU chiplets, though it's not clear when these will hit the market.
It should be noted that neither of Nvidia's MediaTek or Intel partnerships will see the company build its own CPU. As we mentioned earlier, the GB10 uses off-the-shelf Arm cores, and the Intel-based offerings will naturally use the x86-64 instruction set architecture. Nvidia is simply integrating its GPUs at the SoC level where they can share memory with the CPU.
Nvidia declined to offer comment for this story.®
Source: The register