Nvidia is potentially about to announce a new CPU for PCs, featuring an integrated Blackwell GPU, according to reports. This is a story that’s parked well and truly in the rumor and speculation space, of course, but if there’s one company that has the resources to design an Arm CPU for the PC and make it work, it’s Nvidia.
If you want the best gaming CPU for your PC at the moment, you’ll need to buy a chip based on the x86 architecture from Intel or AMD, as that’s what the PC standard has used since the very start (for the most part, at least). However, with Qualcomm showing that you can run some PC games pretty well on Arm CPUs already, Nvidia could potentially make a big splash here, particularly in the race to make the best gaming handheld, where the benefits of Arm CPUs are keenly felt when it comes to battery life.
According to a report on German tech site Computerbase, Nvidia and MediaTek could be gearing up to jointly announce a new PC CPU at the Computex tradeshow in Taiwan. The two firms have already launched the GB10 chip (pictured above) at CES earlier this year, a high-spec system-on-chip that combines an Nvidia Grace CPU with a Blackwell GPU, and is used in Nvidia’s desktop supercomputer, called Project Digits.
However, the Computerbase report states that the MediaTek Computex keynote on May 20 will “include a more in-depth look at the PC business and MediaTek’s ambitions together with Nvidia,” [machine translation] with the latter’s keynote due to take place the day before on May 19. The site speculates that the new PC CPU could have eight or 12 CPU cores, along with a simpler GPU than the GB10 chip and 16GB or 32GB of memory (GB10 has a massive 128GB), adding that the new chip “should also be significantly cheaper” than the expensive GB10 chip.
The question here is where Nvidia would plan to market such a chip. The obvious target is small, affordable desktop PCs that offer a supreme amount of AI processing power. However, there’s also a potential market for gaming here, if that were an area Nvidia chose to pursue. The main barrier here is that Nvidia doesn’t have an x86 license, so it would need to use the Arm architecture instead, which has a reduced instruction set compared to x86.
The performance of Arm isn’t up for debate anymore, but compatibility is a larger question, with Windows on Arm not always offering a smooth experience in the latest games. Plenty of games do support it now, though (you can check the list here), and Nvidia certainly has the huge developer relations resources needed to get games optimized for its tech.
Could the AMD and Intel CPU duopoly be about to break? That’s unlikely right now, given the huge amount of x86-optimized software for PCs at the moment, but it’s not out of the question in the future – if there’s one company that could pull it off, it’s Nvidia, and Qualcomm is making inroads here too. Of course, this story is all based on rumor and speculation as well, so it’s all academic at the moment anyway.
If you want to buy a new CPU in the meantime, check out my Ryzen 7 9800X3D review, as well as my guide on how to install a CPU, where I guide you through the whole process.
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