Nvidia will soon be releasing its own laptop CPUs that do away completely with AMD or Intel CPU technology, and instead rely on Arm-based CPU tech built right into Nvidia’s own system-on-a-chip (SoC). The Nvidia N1 chip is expected to power a range of laptops from partners such as Dell and Lenovo, but gaming performance and compatibility of the devices isn’t yet known.
Nvidia has produced its own Arm-based SoCs before, and still does so for applications such as in-car entertainment. However, it has been a while since the company released a chip directly intended to power consumer PC devices. With the CPU portion of the SoC being based on Arm technology, low power consumption is expected to be a major benefit of these chips, but with most PC games and apps developed for use on x86 CPU designs, as made by AMD and Intel, it’s far from a certainty that these will end up ranking among the best gaming laptops.
The latest information regarding these chips and laptops comes from The Wall Street Journal, which reports that the new “chips for laptop computers are set to hit the market this year in products from Dell, Lenovo and others,” and that while “Nvidia isn’t expecting big profit [from these chips] it wanted to keep a connection with consumers in an era when every device will be AI-enabled.”
As for what the devices will be like, previous leaks have suggested there will be a Dell 16 Premium laptop that uses the chip, and that this 16-inch laptop will have an OLED screen. The chip’s GPU is also expected to house 6,144 CUDA cores, which is the same number as in the RTX 5070, so it should be an impressively powerful option, if this information is correct.
As for the Lenovo laptops, another leak has suggested there will be several models based on both Nvidia N1 and N1X chips, with the Ideapad Slim 5 14N1V11, Ideapad Slim 5 16N1V11, Yoga pro 7 15N1V11, Yoga Yro 7 15N1X11, Yoga 9 2-in-1 16N1X11, and Legion 7 15N1X11 all listed as upcoming models.
Arm-powered PCs and laptops are nothing new, with Google’s Chromebooks using the tech and Qualcomm having made a big push into the laptop space with its Snapdragon Elite chips back in 2024. However, none of these ventures has yet made a significant dent in the dominance of x86-based laptops. That’s in stark contrast to Apple, which made the switch from Intel CPUs to its own Arm-based chips several years ago, and has found huge success using them for both desktop Macs and MacBooks.
Arm is a UK-based technology company that designs the architecture for CPUs, licensing out these designs to a vast number of partners, such as Apple, Nvidia, Samsung, AMD, Intel, and Mediatek, the latter of which Nvidia is partnering with to manufacture these new CPUs. Arm CPUs have long been renowned for generally drawing less power than the x86 CPU architecture that was developed by Intel (and licensed to a small number of companies, such as AMD) and became the dominant design for PCs.
There’s no firm date as to when these new Nvidia N1 laptops will be available, but The Wall Street Journal reports they will be arriving this year.
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