For the past two years, Qualcomm dominated the Windows-on-ARM market with its Snapdragon X series.
Now, Nvidia has entered the arena with the RTX Spark, announced at Computex 2026.
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Nvidia's entry sent Qualcomm's stock down over 10%, wiping out more than $10 billion in market value. The market clearly sees this as a major shift.
Nvidia RTX Spark: What It Brings
The RTX Spark is based on the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, repackaged for Windows laptops.
It combines a custom ARM CPU (developed with MediaTek), a Blackwell RTX GPU, and an AI accelerator on a single 3nm TSMC chip with 70 billion transistors.
It offers up to 20 CPU cores, a 6,144-core Blackwell GPU, and up to 128 GB of unified memory.
Nvidia claims over 1 petaflop of FP4 AI compute, enough to run large AI models locally.
The CPU and GPU are connected via NVLink-C2C, providing up to 600 GB/s bandwidth.
Devices from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft Surface are expected in autumn 2026.
Snapdragon X2 Elite: Qualcomm's Latest
Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon X2 series in September 2025.
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The top model, X2 Elite Extreme, features 18 Oryon cores: 12 Prime cores (up to 5 GHz) and 6 Performance cores (up to 3.6 GHz), sharing 53 MB of cache.
It includes an 80 TOPS NPU and supports up to 48 GB of LPDDR5x memory.
In benchmarks, the X2 Elite Extreme matched Apple's M4 Pro in Cinebench 2024 and Geekbench 6.3 multi-core tests, scoring 1,964 and 23,693 respectively.
Compared to the original Snapdragon X Elite, it offers a 39% improvement in single-core and 50% in multi-core performance.
Gaming performance improved 2.3x, but GPU remains a weak spot.
In 3DMark Steel Nomad, the X2 Elite Extreme scored 1,306 points at 13 fps, lower than the M4 Pro's 1,620.
Some professional tools like AutoCAD are unsupported, and games may crash under emulation.
Head-to-Head Comparison
AI performance: RTX Spark delivers over 100 TOPS, while the Snapdragon X2 Elite's NPU offers 80 TOPS.
