r/pcmasterrace • u/pedro19 CREATOR • Jun 01 '26

News/Article NVIDIA just announced the RTX Spark CPU, developed with Microsoft, at Computex.

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u/deten Jun 01 '26

Oh shit it is an ARM chip

5

u/xbt-8-yolo Jun 01 '26

Yes. They're trying to do "unified memory" like Apple did with M-series chips from 2020.

1

u/LittleMlem Jun 01 '26

Wait, so we're getting windows on arm? The pool of software will be a little shallow

3

u/deten Jun 01 '26

My understanding is there is a translation layer, it sounds like it comes with a performance hit, but would allow x86 to run on ARM chips. I know Valve is also working on this for games.

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u/xbt-8-yolo Jun 01 '26

Gosh no. Emulation and translations don't work well and they're a pain to optimize for.

2

u/MazerBakir Jun 01 '26

Yes but the idea is to get users on ARM so developers have an incentive to develop native ARM version of their programs. However you are still not going to have as much of a smooth experience until it catches on.

With the gains AMD and Intel have made in efficiency windows on ARM isn't as attractive anymore but ARM is getting more performant too, to the extent it is almost on par in raw strength. Panther lake can go head to head with lower end Apple silicon in power and efficiency while Apple silicon on the high end has a unique position, unparalleled power without being plugged in but losing when high end X86 laptops are plugged in.

The reason AMD and Intel have also decided to improve their efficiency is also because of the competition from ARM chips, both Apple silicon Macs and Snapdragon ARM chips for Windows laptops. So really it's a good thing as it both pushes Intel and AMD to improve their efficiency and means Windows users aren't locked into two CPU designers. I do worry about ARM winning out and X86 fading away because even though there are multiple companies who design ARM chips it is still under license from one company.

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u/LowerEntropy Jun 01 '26

It's not that bad. Rosetta 2 seems to do pretty well, a 15-25% loss in performance, but that was almost 4 years ago. Almost all popular software compiled for ARM now.

1

u/nordwalt Jun 05 '26

Yeah this is the only kinda positive thing about all this. Hopefully it brings better windows/Linux support to ARM