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Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Integrated Memory. I'm your friend David Pierce and on today's episode, we are going to talk about the Nvidia RTX Spark, a new computer chip that Nvidia thinks might help it make a mainstream play into laptops and that might shake up the Windows industry for a long time. The Verge's senior editor Sean Hollister is going to come on, we're going to talk all about it. But first, here's a look at everything else happening at the Verge today. It's 90 seconds on the Verge for Tuesday, June 2nd, 2026. Today is Microsoft Build Day. It's Microsoft's annual developer keynote and in addition to lots of new Windows features and lots
of new AI developer tools, Microsoft announced a new product called Scout. It's an AI personal assistant agent kind of like Gemini Spark or Open Claw designed to actually use AI to go do things on your behalf. And fun fact about this, it's actually built directly on the Open Claw technology, which is very funny given that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella only a few months ago compared Open Claw to a computer virus. Things change fast, but this idea of doing stuff on your devices is everywhere and it is absolutely taking over inside of Microsoft. Microsoft also announced a new quantum chip as it continues to push towards quantum computing. It announced a new Surface
device, the RTX Spark Dev Box based on Nvidia's new chip that it hopes will help people make more AI tools because Microsoft's whole thing is making it easy for you to make AI tools, whether you like it or not. President Trump signed an executive order essentially asking AI companies to give the government 30 days to review AI models before they release them. This is a version of an executive order that's been floating around for a while. At one point it got shelved, but it's a big change for the Trump administration, which has gone from essentially an anything goes policy to AI to trying to have some more oversight. We'll see how that goes.
Finally, some big news for me in particular. Nintendo Music, which until now has just been a mobile app for listening to soundtracks from your favorite Nintendo games, is now a web app and supports CarPlay, which means I will be driving to the Mario Kart soundtrack for the rest of my life. You can read more about all of this at the verge.com. That's it. That's 90 seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, June 2nd. All right, let's switch gears now and talk about chips. The Verge's Sean Hollister, welcome to the show. Hi. Glad to be back. We bring you here when I need you to explain whether a chip is any good. This is one of your jobs here at The Verge is this chip any good? Um Nvidia just launched a new chip, the RTX Spark that I would say it is making some
pretty gigantic, grandiose claims about. But first, let's just back up a little bit. How big a deal is it that Nvidia is launching what amounts to a sort of mainstream computer chip? On the one hand, Nvidia's in everything, right? It's got graphics chips that have been in laptops for years now. It's got pixels flying down from the cloud into your devices. But they haven't been in many devices as the CPU, as the central part of your computer. That's been true if you've got the Nintendo Switch. It's been true if you had like the Shield, the Shield tablet from years ago. But now it's the thing. It's like the Apple chip. It's the Qualcomm chip at the heart of the PC. It's the Intel,
it's the AMD chip at the heart of the PC now. They're finally doing that thing where they are the silicon. And so, Nvidia getting into that realm, it means that there are going to be lots more ARM-based laptops in the world that are taking over from x86. In fact, the number of ARM manufacturers now outnumbers the x86 cuz there's AMD and Intel, but on the other side of things we have Apple and Qualcomm and now Nvidia. So, we're in this kind of ARM's moment. But are these chips any good? You're asking me to come in and say that. They say it's the most peace efficient PC chip ever built. That is the quote. And like Apple in 2020, they have no statistics. They have no graphs. They
have no charts. They have nothing to back that up right now. Right. Well, Apple in 2020 strikes me as like the best case scenario here, right? Because Apple showed up in 2020 and was like, "Hey, we have these M-series chips. We're not going to tell you anything about them. Here's a bunch of graphs that don't mean anything." And then essentially upended the PC industry, right? Like all kind of all at once just lapped everybody in terms of what you can expect out of your laptop. What I'm trying to figure out is what Nvidia is trying to do here, right? Because Nvidia obviously has lots of stuff to talk about when it comes to AI.
Has lots of stuff to talk about when it comes to video games. Lots of stuff to sell you on both of those fronts, too. But it's also, like you said, trying to do a very mainstream computer chip. And Jensen Huang, the Nvidia CEO, was even talking about lower-end laptops. Like, what is your sense of what Nvidia's game is here? Is it just complete chip domination because it's Nvidia and that's what it wants? Or is it trying to do something specific here? I think there's two things. One, there is the market opportunity of AI and being able to say that, you know, we want to be powering the AI computer. We want to be at the forefront of the entire AI revolution. But I also think it's kind of hedging against
Nvidia knows from very prominent and embarrassing history for other companies that if you are not at the heart of the device, there is always a chance that you miss the next computing revolution. Even though it seems like Nvidia is at the forefront, at the heart of the AI computing revolution right now, they can look back and say, "Well, Intel wasn't in the phone." And that was a big problem for Intel when the tide turned, when it wasn't just, you know, blackberries and dumb phones, but now it was Intel inside being you didn't have them in the phone. That was a problem for Intel. It was they missed out on the phone because of that. And Nvidia, by the way, even at one point made a pretty big mobile play.
Like you said with the switch that's running a smartphone chip. That was the Tegra processor. They tried to make a mobile phone. Yeah. Tegra There were a couple of Tegra phone attempts back in the day. There were tablets. There were You can credit Nvidia for making a $199 Android tablets a thing. We talked about it in 2012 and 2013 on the verge. But in terms of like you don't want to necessarily miss being at the heart of things. You famously wrote reams about the Amazon Fire phone and how Amazon wasn't able to be, you know, the platform owner there because they couldn't get the OS that they wanted onto phones. They couldn't
get a foothold there. So now they have to rely on can we now sell hundreds of millions of Alexa devices into your home? Can we get our foothold into people's homes and lives that way instead? So here is Nvidia seeing an opportunity, but also possibly hedging a huge bet in case people decide that local AI is the thing and not cloud AI and we don't trust the AI clouds with every single thing that we're doing in our personal lives. If Google if, you know, if Meta if Microsoft decide at some point, you know, that they are the cloud owners, you know, if they decide at some point they and Amazon if they decide at some point we want to back a different player instead for AI. And, you know, and if things keep advancing at the speed they're
advancing, maybe somebody could leapfrog Nvidia in the you know, in the AI server realm. It's not out of the realm of possibility given how much money thrown at it. They've got a tremendous lead, but here is a huge hedge bet here. Maybe they can also be the local AI provider, the core of your experience whenever you touch the device in the first place. Interesting. And I do think A, that is a good outcome for the world that we do more AI processing on the edge on our devices. Like there are just a lot of reasons that's a good thing. And I think a lot of people are hopeful that's where this lands that rather than have everything happen in data centers and in the cloud that actually your device just starts to do things. Um
what I am struggling to figure out though is if I'm Nvidia, right? And I have this big giant goal to sort of own the whole AI future. Which I think it does. I don't think that is a particularly huge overstatement for what Nvidia is trying to do right now. At what point does Nvidia just make Windows? Right? Like I'm looking at this and it's like, okay, Nvidia is launching a chip and it's like, okay, if you're going to launch a chip because you want to be in laptops because you think normal everyday laptops are going to become AI machines. And I think you're right that Nvidia does think that. And Jensen won't even talked about, you know, there's this new interface that's coming. We're going to interact with our
computers in different ways. At some point they're going to make Windows, right? Like if the play is what you're describing, they're going to have to try to be Apple and just make the whole thing from the inside out. Right? Like is this I don't know. This feels at some point like Nvidia is just trying to own the whole world. I feel like they could. I feel like I don't know if they want to. They have One thing that Microsoft does tremendously well for everybody in that ecosystem is they are the glue that pulls all the developers together and says, "Hey, we're all pulling together here." And Nvidia also famously pretty good at that. But I would say that Microsoft, you know, if you want to make sure that your the Adobes of the
world and you know, the Epic Games of the world and so on. If you have the power of Microsoft to say, "We are the OS, we are the Xbox company, we are the games company. We want we know we have all the relationships that we spent all this time building. It's maybe easier at least in the short term for Nvidia to lean on that and say, yeah, we there's a platform here we can build on. But I don't think it's out of the question if they wanted to make, you know, an operating system someday and own it completely vertically like Apple, why not? Particularly cuz then they can put that in the cloud, they can deliver that to your device remotely as well as doing it locally. Why not? I don't think we've heard them state that,
but we've certainly, you know, like you said, they're trying to dominate every angle of it. So, all of that actually makes total sense to me and I think starting with the chip, obviously, is what you do if you're Nvidia, that's its core competency. Like, of course, that's where you'd start. What do we and don't we know about this chip at this point? I think to your point about it just sort of appeared and they said a name and we don't have a lot of information about it. Nvidia gets a lot of credit just for being Nvidia. There is this sense that like because Nvidia did it, it's probably very good. My sense is we don't have a lot of details on what this actual family of laptop processors is going to be. What do we know at this point?
The super funny thing about the RTX Spark super chip is that it already exists and it was already released in a device by Nvidia called the DGX Spark. This is they called it like an AI supercomputer or something. I just you just sparked this memory of like it's we have a picture of it behind glass and they're like It's a tiny gold box, like tiny I don't know why it's gold, but it was it was very gold. I don't know if they thought Trump was going to come by that day or something, but anyhow, tiny gold box with a big arm chip and a substantial chunk of like laptop mobile graphics power, GeForce graphics power
in there. And what they did originally was they just released it as like a $4,000, $5,000 AI box and they said, "Hey, run your local models on it." What happened around the same time as that then? Maybe after they announced it before they released it was AMD decided that they were going to also build a super chip, quote unquote. They didn't call it a super chip, whatever. Called the Strix Halo or the Ryzen AI Max platform Max Plus. And so this thing like AMD's chip has a crap load of memory, 128 gigs of memory on the chip, gobs of memory inside this AMD chip and they made it an application processor. They put it in little desktops for consumers like the framework desktop. They put it in handhelds. I tested the most powerful handheld ever made. There's several of
them now, but the one I tested was called the GPD Win 5 with Strix Halo. It's like 1080p PlayStation 5 level gaming in the palms of your hands. And Nvidia I'm guessing maybe they were already planning it, but Windows wasn't ready for it. Maybe they saw what AMD was doing and said, you know, we could have that too. We just got to take this chip and turn it around. And so what they've announced today is the RTX Spark. The highest end RTX Spark is literally that same spec. It is 6,000 plus GPU cores. It's 20 CPU cores. It's made on a TSMC 3 process. MediaTek is Nvidia's partner. Can't just credit Nvidia here. This is a MediaTek chip with Nvidia IP on it manufactured
by TSMC and they're not saying where, so we have to assume not here in the United States or they would make a big deal with that. Surprise. 128 gigs of that memory, unified memory, so everything's super fast and that memory can go to whichever part of the system that needs it at that speed. And it has chip like immediately sort of leaps to the like tippy top end of consumer level chips, right? It might, in terms of a monolithic thing, if it's like one chip on a board. But, it doesn't have the most powerful graphics you can get in a laptop, just the most powerful graphics you might be able to get on a
single chip design. Okay. So, in a beefy gaming laptop, you could have an RTX 59 mobile processor in there, which would be super, you know, balls to the wall gaming graphics. Whereas, in this version, we're talking more like RTX 570 mobile, so a couple tiers down. That might be the fastest mobile graphics we've ever seen. It might not. We haven't tested. It certainly isn't as high as you could possibly get if you had a couple of chips in a big beefy laptop. But, their pitch here is you have all this performance and it is very thin and it's very light and it's very cool because
it's an ARM CPU and it is monolithic here on single chip that does all this stuff. Support for the show comes from Even Realities. Think about the last time you walked into a big meeting and wished your talking points could just stay with you without losing your place or your train of thought. Even Realities built exactly that. Even G2, our productivity smart glasses, designed to keep real-time support right in view. With teleprompting, conversation support, real-time translation, AI assistance, and more, they help you stay on top of work and daily life. And unlike most smart glasses, they're designed to look and feel like premium eyewear. With no camera and a lightweight 36-gram design,
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Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just difficult, it can feel intimidating, too. You put so much time and energy into something without knowing if it will actually succeed. But maybe there's a better way to think about it. What if it does work? What if your instincts have been right from the beginning? Shopify wants to help you make that happen. They're the commerce platform powering millions of businesses worldwide and nearly 10% of all US e-commerce. From established brands like Allbirds and Heinz to new businesses just starting out. Their design tools make it easy to build the exact online storefront you've been picturing with hundreds of customizable templates ready
to go. And with built-in marketing tools, you can create full email and social campaigns in just a few clicks helping you reach customers wherever they are. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com/vergecast. One of the things that was most surprising in seeing this announcement was that these chips won't be able to run Nvidia's graphics cards. And it's like, "Hey guys, I don't know if you know this.
People really liked your graphics cards. That's actually one of the things a lot of people are attempting to buy from you right now. They cost a billion dollars and no one can get any, but this is like a core competency of this company." And this is what I keep thinking about is like, if Nvidia had just come out and said, "We are releasing essentially the full hardware stack to make the greatest gaming laptops you've ever seen in your entire life." That would make perfect sense to me, right? But there's there's just these little pieces of things missing that I'm It's where the strategy starts to fall off for me.
What do you make of the fact that you can't attach this thing to something like a discrete GPU, which is what a vast number of Nvidia fans want to do? I think this is unfortunately or unfortunately this is increasingly becoming the way of laptops. If you are not very specifically self-selecting as I am a gamer, I am a video creator, you're going to buy a laptop that kind of has everything encapsulated in one chip that does it all for you because that's where they find the efficiency. That's where they stop having to worry about making different kinds of chips talk together and use up the right kind of
battery and have the cooling allocated the way that they need so that it doesn't get too hot. So, you'll you'll still have the big beefy thicker machines when you want the discrete. They just won't have this chip in them. They could theoretically make another kind of chip that does it, but we haven't really seen ARM chips attached to discrete graphics cards yet. We didn't see it in the Mac Pro when Apple did its Apple Silicon there. We haven't seen it in Nvidia, but if anybody's going to make that work, it's going to be a company like Nvidia which has everything to gain by also selling you a discrete GPU. Just not in this rev, I think. That's fair. Yeah, and I guess it does
make sense if you're trying to make this sort of mainstream play doing the best you can is within the one chip is probably the correct answer. Like I guess we have to give Nvidia chance to release more than one of these things. I have to laugh that you say mainstream play though because as with every bet you factor here they're not talking about price, they're not talking about like how powerful the other chips are. One of the things I think is most interesting here is that Nvidia announced most of the PC industry as its partners. Um and not only that, they didn't I think like every time Qualcomm does one of these, they put up the slide
and they're like, "We're working with these 11 companies." And you're like, "What are they working on?" And they're like, "Well, we'll never tell." And but not only did Nvidia launch this with a bunch of big name launch partners, Lenovo and HP and Dell and Asus and kind of all the companies you would want if you're trying to make a real mainstream laptop play. Every major PC announcing products. They're they're like shipping devices soon and they're announcing those devices with specs like this is a finished thing. And Microsoft in particular basically announced a new flagship laptop, the Surface Laptop Ultra, that
is running the RTX Spark. And so again this thing feels big. You get the sense Nvidia is not sort of shipping a chip in the way that a lot of companies do where they're like, "Well, we have the one that runs Intel and then if you want we'll lift it out and put another one in and you can just sort of pick a processor AMD or Intel when you buy that. Like this is we are creating new kinds of devices for this chip and they seem to have the whole PC industry on board. They really do. That feels huge to me. Yeah, it is big and it, you know, they announced eight laptops and I think they showed like four mini PCs on stage at Computex, but they say there's 30 laptops already in development, 10 mini desktops, and that's just the initial allocation. Those are going to
be the ones that have probably have the full fat version of this chip doing, you know, your 128 gig of RAM and your 6,000 cores, but it's going to be more than that it sounds like and they're talking about this being family of chips. The RAM will maybe not always be stratospheric prices of 128 gigs, but it'll go down to like 16 gig of RAM like you might find in an average notebook. Uh they say there's a huge market opportunity here. And I don't know I don't entirely know where that where the confidence comes from beyond the fact that they're Nvidia and they can afford to throw so much money at it and
every manufacturer kind of has to line up cuz you better be on good terms with Nvidia right now. Um but it could be a very big deal. It could be they are a big player, maybe bigger than Qualcomm uh in this space. Um they could be right up there with Intel and AMD in a year or three. Who knows? Um because they are putting serious effort and it looks like the partners are also putting serious effort behind this. And this could be a, um, regardless of whether you, personally, listener, want to buy, uh, one of these machines, it could be good for the ecosystem, uh, because it's going to force Windows to get better, it's going to force more developers to support arm, and it seems pretty support arm faster than they might have otherwise, I should
say. And it seems pretty clear that arm is one of the powerful, efficient futures for personal computing. It's going to make our laptops last longer and cooler and battery life and all these kinds of things that we've already seen in no small quantity from Apple and from Qualcomm. Yeah, I feel like over the last really year or so, this incredibly long progress-free Windows on arm journey is finally happening. Like I feel like I finally have some real confidence in companies that ship Windows on arm products, that it will mostly work. And it's it's still through emulation, there's still stuff that can go wrong, a lot of this still needs some updating on the part of developers, but it does feel
like we've at least raised the floor on this enough that I don't immediately see this as like giant red flag, none of your apps are going to work properly. It feels like we've at least solved that problem, and now all that's left is to really sort of optimize. And it does, to your point, Nvidia is maybe better than anybody in the industry not named Apple at making people build stuff to its specs. So just the fact that it's out here doing this might be a huge win for Windows on arm as a whole. I have to agree, I have to agree. And I haven't used, I have to admit, I've not used a Qualcomm machine as my daily driver yet. I haven't used a Surface, you know, with Qualcomm as the daily driver. I think maybe Tom
Specifically speaking, I don't think anyone has, so don't feel bad. So I feel like there is still a lot to prove, but they say they say they're convinced between Nvidia wrangling companies and Microsoft wrangling companies, that's a lot of developers that are going to turn around and say, "Yeah, we're going to support this." We're seeing PUBG, League of Legends, Valorant from Riot Games. Like, these are games and Fortnite already came to arm. These are games from companies that are like, "Steam Deck, Linux, we're not going to support that stuff. Show us a user base." And here, they're like, "Yeah, we're going to support arm.
We're going to support Qualcomm. We're going to support Nvidia regardless of whether they have a user base yet because they are just so big and so good at making those deals. Totally. So, lest I get too excited before we wrap up here, these things are going to cost a fortune, right? At least the first rev of these we think is coming out sometime this fall. I feel like you basically couldn't tell me a number that would shock me in terms of how expensive these might be. I literally said on the call uh yeah, in front of, you know, their executives in a room full of journalists. I think I literally said um
this could cost $1,500, this could cost $8,000. I have no idea. Can you please give us some hint, anything? And they didn't have a hint, so. I'm going to go ahead and guess it's a lot closer to 8,000 than 1,500. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if it's 3,500, 4K, even 5K and just they'll see how many AI bros buy it, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it just seems to me there is I think there is going to be this first run that is not going to be for most people, but it'll be for some people. But, the question of A, can Nvidia's chips hack it? Is the big
question. Uh and then question number two is like, are we actually due for some big reimagining of how we use our PCs and thus what we need them to do? And those are both very open questions, right? Like, I think that the whole bet from this industry right now is we're going to do computer things vastly differently. We're going to need different things from our processors, the interfaces are going to be different, the ways that we input into them is going to be different. All of this stuff is due to change and we have to rebuild the PC around it. Boy, is that not settled fact yet. Uh but it is I think my sense is at least the first year of this is going to be like not should I buy this computer, but like is there something here?
Yeah. Yeah, and luckily for uh for everybody listening uh they tend to send us the machines so that we can test that. Yeah. There's there's a world in which at some point you and Antonio Divinadato on our team are both going to have like $100,000 worth of laptops just sitting in your house. And this is what we're going to be doing for a while. Can't wait. looking forward to that. All right, Sean, good to see you. Thank you as always. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Sean for being here and thank you as always for watching and listening. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feedback, if you know what a Spark PC is going to cost, we would
absolutely love to hear from you. The number is 866-811. The email is ver***@t******e.com. Thank you to everybody who's already reached out with thoughts about this new daily thing that we're doing. Lots of good ideas, lots of stuff that we're going to keep working on and keep improving. Keep all of your feedback coming. And remember, if you want to get this and all of our podcasts ad free, the best thing you can do is subscribe to the Verge. theverge.com/subscribe gets you all of our shows ad free, gets you all of our subscriber newsletters, all of our coverage, everything. theverge.com/subscribe.
The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This episode is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Lauchuk, and Aaron LaCade. We'll see you tomorrow. Rock and roll.
