Well, here it is, Nvidia's all-in-one silicon, the RTX Spark. This is an SoC that's being promoted as the everything chip; the processor that can be all things to all people. It's a creator's chip, it's an AI-lover's chip, and it's a gamer's chip.

But all three of those kinds of people do need to have one thing in common: they need to be rather well off, because this is also an expensive chip. I spoke about it when the pricing first came to light last week, while I was at the launch event for this Windows-based tech. Even the cheapest of the RTX Spark machines coming our way will cost $2,700, and that will only get you the weaker cores, a paltry 24 GB of unified memory, and a 512 GB SSD.

That is certainly a limitation, but also completely expected in a time where all things PC cost a ludicrous amount of money, especially devices which are locked into requiring a colossal amount of memory to do their main task. Which, let's be honest here, is AI.

The unified memory architecture (UMA) of the RTX Spark is perfectly suited to providing a ton of memory for system resources, but also to be able to switch that over to supporting the GPU when it comes to smashing through local AI workloads which fill up the GPU's memory pool. It's the perfect time for Nvidia to release something like this, because local AI is set for a bit of an explosion in popularity (especially when the cloud services start charging real money for their services), but it's also the worst time because this sort of memory-heavy hardware is expensive .

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