Nvidia unveils RTX Spark, first Arm silicon to challenge MacBook Pro on-device

At IFA 2026 in Berlin, Nvidia showed laptops and mini-PCs built on RTX Spark for the first time — an Arm-based SoC that packages a Grace CPU with up to 20 cores, a Blackwell-series GPU with up to 6,144 cores, and unified memory in a single die. The architecture looks more like Apple Silicon than a conventional Windows laptop with a discrete card, and the stated aim is to run agentic workloads such as OpenClaw locally, with no cloud dependency.

Lenovo Yoga 9n: premium 16-inch 2-in-1 with specs nearing a mobile RTX 5080

The Lenovo Yoga 9n 2-in-1 is the first device to reach reviewers. It carries a 2,880×1,800 OLED touch panel at 120 Hz, measures 1.75 cm (0.69 in) thick — just 0.08 cm more than the 16-inch MacBook Pro — and packs six speakers plus a 9.2-megapixel camera. On core count alone, the integrated GPU should land theoretically between a mobile RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080, though Nvidia has released no official benchmarks and has not quoted battery life. Lower-tier configurations will follow, and the full performance envelope remains unknown.

Yoga Pro 9n: thinner 15-inch option with up to 128 GB memory

Alongside the larger model, Lenovo introduced the 15-inch Yoga Pro 9n (2,560×1,600, 1.68 cm at its thinnest) for users who prefer a more compact footprint. The key difference is memory: the standard 9n tops out at 64 GB, while the Pro 9n reaches 128 GB — a critical figure for running large models locally. Both share a rounded chassis, a large haptic trackpad, and a high-resolution camera, but only the Pro includes a Force Pad that supports writing and drawing directly with a dedicated pen.

Broad laptop and mini-PC wave: Dell, Asus, Microsoft, HP, Acer

The launch extends well beyond Lenovo. The RTX Spark lineup also includes the Dell XPS 16, Asus ProArt P16, and Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra, all targeting creators and AI enthusiasts, plus a single 14-inch entry so far, the HP OmniBook X 14. In the mini-PC space, Acer announced the SFF RTX Spark, following the Asus ProArt Mini PC shown this summer; both occupy a footprint similar to the Mac Mini. The shared objective: hardware that can execute end-to-end agentic models on-device, keeping financial data, emails, and other sensitive information off the cloud.