San Francisco Frontiers - Nvidia launches Windows laptop chip in consumer PC push

Analysts said the US hardware titan's move challenges the likes of Apple, Intel and AMD in the PC domain, although the new devices will likely carry a hefty price tag.

It also represents an attempt by Nvidia -- which the AI boom has made the world's most valuable company -- to diversify into the consumer market, even as it reaps record profits from massive demand for its data centre processors from global tech giants.

"Microsoft and Nvidia are going to reinvent the PC. This is going to be the new PC," said Jensen Huang, chief executive of the US tech giant, as he launched RTX Spark ahead of Computex, a major technology show.

"If you want to run digital biology, no problem. If you want to do seismic processing, no problem. You want astrophysics, no problem," Huang said.

"Microsoft and Nvidia meticulously optimised everything so that this computer literally runs everything the world has ever created, plus it now runs agents, an incredible computer."

Nvidia is best known for its GPUs, specialised computer chips originally designed to render video game graphics at high speed, which have more recently become the engine behind AI tools from chatbots to image generators and agents that can carry out tasks for users.

As governments and companies pour hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure, the company's value has topped $5 trillion, more than the gross domestic product of Japan or India.

But Monday's announcement instead focuses on a new CPU, or central processing unit, which acts like the brain of a personal computer.

"Nvidia is bypassing the traditional PC supply chain to build an end-to-end hardware monopoly," Stephen Wu, a former AI software engineer and founder of the Carthage Capital investment fund, told AFP, calling the news a long-awaited development in the tech industry.

Wu called it an "existential threat" to current laptop chip designs, and a strategic attempt by Nvidia to get programmers to build new tech products on their hardware, which will boost data centre GPU demand.

"Intel and AMD are the immediate casualties," Wu said, adding that "for AI users, this hardware will finally provide the memory bandwidth necessary to run robust local models without latency".

It is not the first time Nvidia chips have powered Windows devices -- a range of tablets did so in the early 2010s.

But the new device is positioned as a tool that can easily run AI services such as agents, which have the ability to carry out tasks for users.

"This is the first completely re-engineered, reinvented line of PCs that has happened in 40 years," Huang said.

"There is no question this reinvention of the computer is as big of a deal as the reinvention of the phone into what we now know as the smartphone."

H.Reyes--SFF