Processor Arm Race Heats Up as Nvidia Could Soon Challenge Intel, Amd and Apple With its N1X Laptop

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Nvidia's big consumer chips for PCs, the Arm-based N1 and N1X, could finally be about to arrive if a new rumor is correct.

A report from DigiTimes (hat tip to VideoCardz) claims that laptops with Nvidia's N1X chip inside will be launching in the first quarter of 2026. So, within the next two months.

These will target the consumer market, and three other variants will be on sale in Q2, we're told. Presumably, that includes the base N1 chip, which is less powerful, but still intended for producing 'high-end AI computing platforms' - the N1X is the more performant CPU which will be aimed at notebooks for professionals, the report observes.

There's still some confusion around the naming and where exactly the N1 and N1X will fit into the CPU landscape, with some guessing that the N1 will be a desktop chip, and the N1X a mobile (laptop) chip. However, DigiTimes makes it clear that both the N1 and N1X will appear in laptops (add your own seasoning, naturally). That doesn't mean that there couldn't be a desktop variant of one of these chips as well, though, and perhaps that's still planned.

Following the N1 series, the next-gen N2 silicon will take the baton for Nvidia in the third quarter of 2027, the report claims.

Obviously, be skeptical about that timeframe in particular, because even if Nvidia has plans for these N2 chips, this schedule may end up going awry (what with the silicon still being relatively early in development).

The rumor comes from supply chain sources, we're informed, and the delay of the N1 series - which was supposed to arrive late in 2025 as per the original speculation about Nvidia's Arm CPU - is due to Team Green fine-tuning these chips, and "Microsoft OS timelines", the report states.

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