With just a few hours to go before the opening of Computex 2026, signals are multiplying that Nvidia will be announcing its N1X chip. After two years of aborted announcements and postponed deadlines, NVIDIA’s ARM chip for notebook PCs finally seems about to emerge from the shadows. Indeed, since Friday May 29, the discourse has taken another turn. Arm, NVIDIA and Microsoft simultaneously published a press release on X announcing the “Coming of a new era for personal computers”, together with GPS coordinates pointing to the Taipei Music Center. This is exactly where NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang will present his GTC conference on June 1. A few hours later, Pavan Davuluri, head of Windows and Surface at Microsoft, followed suit, hinting that an unprecedented event was in store for developers.
Is this the time for Nvidia’s Windows N1X SoC?
Meanwhile, several leaks strongly suggest that manufacturers will be announcing new products based on these chips. Dell looks set to announce an XPS powered by the N1X chip. For Lenovo, the info comes from a Chinese leaker who leaked a list of seven portable PCs equipped with N1 and N1X chips. Among them is a 15-inch Legion 7… Yes, an ARM-based gamer’s laptop, the boundary is becoming blurred. ASUS, for its part, posted a short teaser video on X, suggesting a future ProArt based on an N1X chip. Finally, at Microsoft, Davuluri’s message also suggests the arrival of new Surface devices.
What can we expect from Nvidia’s ARM chip for Windows notebooks?
A lot has been said about Nvidia’s PC SoC. First of all, this chip doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a version based on the GB10 already found in the DGX Spark. It’s an ARM SoC etched in 3nm by TSMC, developed jointly with MediaTek for the CPU part, and incorporating Nvidia DNA for the GPU part. The two dies are interconnected via a proprietary high-speed link.
The real difference could lie elsewhere, and particularly with CUDA. Qualcomm may dominate Windows on ARM with its Snapdragon X chips, but these do not support NVIDIA’s software stack. Yet CUDA is an important gateway to AI development, professional 3D and gaming. An N1X laptop would offer, for the first time, native access to CUDA, Tensor Cores and hardware ray tracing on a Windows-based ARM platform. For gamers, this means the promise of an integrated GPU capable of competing with a mobile graphics card (something Qualcomm has failed to offer in almost 2 years with its platform).
