Starting this Friday, you’ll have multiple laptop makers banging on your door, haranguing you about buying what they’ll call a “new class of PC” as your next laptop. They’re promising to revolutionize local AI work, push rendering to peak levels, and still have the performance you want as a gaming device. The reality is more complicated, but Nvidia’s new laptop chip built for pricey devices may finally move PCs in the right direction—pushing for local compute above any AI subscription.

Nvidia invited me out to San Francisco to get even more hands-on experience with its laptops and desktops, all running its newfangled N1X chip. That being said, I’ve handled these PCs at Computex and IFA this year, too, so this wasn’t my first rodeo. However, it was the first time Nvidia decided to reveal what precise performance consumers could expect from these laptops.

The N1X chip is distinct in several ways. One is the CPU tile co-developed with MediaTek. It’s an ARM-based processor distinct from the usual x86 microarchitecture promoted by AMD and Intel. This is called a “Grace” CPU, and the top-end configuration sports an even number of 10 performance (P) cores and 10 efficiency (E) cores spread among two clusters.

The GPU is where things get spicy. Nvidia’s plan to push local AI on PCs is a brute-force application of its CUDA GPU architecture. The top-end configuration includes 6,144 GPU cores, the same number as a desktop-level RTX 5070 graphics card. You should not expect anywhere the same performance from a laptop with a limited power threshold, though it’s still a huge hunk of processing power to throw at rendering, gaming, or—yes—AI tasks.

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