NVIDIA's first PC processor performance revealed to be about two years behind Apple chips

[ Gearbest Technology News]Nvidia recently officially demonstrated its processor solution RTX Spark for Windows PCs and positioned it as a “super chip” with high AI performance. According to foreign media reports, judging from the public specifications and previously leaked test results, this chip is close to Apple’s self-developed chip route in terms of design ideas, but in terms of CPU performance, it still lags behind Apple’s products two years ago.

NVIDIA RTX Spark

According to GearbestTechnology, RTX Spark integrates a Grace CPU based on ARM architecture with 20 cores. It is also equipped with an RTX GPU using Blackwell architecture, containing 6144 CUDA cores, and adds fifth-generation Tensor Core, supporting up to 128GB of unified memory, and NVLink-C2C interconnection with a bandwidth of 600GB/s. Nvidia said that the chip is oriented to AI, content creation and gaming scenarios and can be used in thin and light Windows notebooks. It supports tasks such as processing 90GB-level 3D scenes, generating 4K AI videos and 12K video editing. It can also locally run a large language model with a parameter scale of 120 billion and a context length of up to 1 million tags.

From the product definition, RTX Spark has obvious similarities with Apple chips, which integrates CPU, GPU, neural network processing capabilities and high-speed unified memory into a single chip to improve energy efficiency and collaborative efficiency. However, Nvidia has not released official running score data that can be directly compared with Apple chips. What the outside world is currently referring to more often is an N1X test record that appeared on Geekbench in June 2025 and was subsequently deleted. The record shows that this 20-core chip has a base frequency of 2.81GHz and is equipped with 128GB of unified memory. It has a single-core score of 3096 points and a multi-core score of 18837 points.

For comparison, the M3 Max on the 16-inch MacBook Pro has a single-core score of 3128 points and a multi-core score of 20969 points; the M3 Pro's highest score is a single-core score of 3105 points and a multi-core score of 15255 points. After entering the M5 generation, the M5 single-core score of the 14-inch MacBook Pro has reached 4224 points, and the multi-core score is 17465 points; the 18-core M5 Max single-core score is about 4200 points, and the multi-core score is close to 30000 points. If the above N1X results can represent the early level of RTX Spark, then its single-core performance is roughly close to that of the M3 series, but there is a significant gap compared with the M5 series.

It should be pointed out that the N1X test results belong to the early version data, and NVIDIA may have updated the design, frequency and calibration in the future. However, judging from the current public information, NVIDIA has entered this market for the first time and has shown a clear layout for Windows ARM notebooks and local AI computing. Just from the perspective of CPU performance, this product is still far behind Apple's current generation of self-developed chips.

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