Nvidia's long-awaited N1X Arm chip for the PC will be released within months according to a new report

It's been an awfully long time coming, but Nvidia's near-mythical Arm chip for the PC, known as N1X, could be just about to launch. Last week it was spotted in a shipping manifest. Now a new report claims it's set to be released by the end of March.

According to Digitimes (via Tomshardware), "Windows on Arm (WoA) platform notebooks using the N1X will debut in the first quarter of 2026." The report claims that after the launch of an initial variant of N1X in Q1 2026, three more versions of the chip will be released in Q2.

What's more, Digitimes further says that Nvidia has a follow up, codenamed N2, lined up for release in the third quarter.

If all this is true it's both exciting and somewhat peculiar. After all, we've just had the CES 2026 show, which surely would have been the perfect opportunity to get the maximum number of eyeballs on what Nvidia presumably plans to be a game changing chip for the PC industry.

To pass that opportunity up only to launch a month or two later? That's a bit odd. Of course, the tech industry is currently in flux thanks to the ongoing RAMpocolypse. So that could be a factor.

What's more, there are reports that critical support from Microsoft in the form of a specific build of Windows on Arm for Nvidia's new chip may be delaying Nvidia's plans. It's worth noting that the current Windows on Arm OS running on PCs with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips are specifically optimised for that architecture.

That version on Windows on Arm is more "Windows on Snapdragon". An equivalent version of Windows will be needed for Nvidia's chip.

All that said, what to make of Nvidia's upcoming chip? We know from no lesser an authority than Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang that it will be based on the GB10 "Superchip" in the DGX Spark. What we don't know is whether "based on" means essentially the same or if the version of GB10 that becomes N1X could have a shared architecture but different specs.

Broadly, GB10 is a tale of two halves. Of the two, GB10's CPU is less impressive. Sure, it has 20 CPU cores, which sounds like a lot. But those cores are off-the-shelf Arm A725 and X925 designs, 10 of each, built into a CPU die by partner company Mediatek. These designs were released back in mid 2024 by Arm.

They're decent enough cores. But by most metrics look to have adequate rather than outstanding performance. Importantly, they do not have hardware features to accelerate x86 software emulation, unlike Qualcomm's chips, which could be a problem for running existing PC games. In short, they're not nearly as exciting as custom Arm cores built by Nvidia would be.

That's even more of a problem now that it would have been had Nvidia released N1X a year ago or so. Qualcomm has now announced its second-gen Snapdragon X2 chips, Intel has Panther Lake. And, of course, Apple keeps iterating its M Series of chips with extremely powerful Arm cores.

The industry is moving on and we may have to wait for that next-gen N2 version before Nvidia introduces custom cores. But we do at least know Nvidia has designed its own Arm cores.

The GPU side, however, now that is really exciting. It broadly has the same specs as an RTX 5070 desktop GPU, including 6,144 Blackwell generation CUDA cores. However, GB10's iGPU die is built on TSMC's N3 node, a full generation ahead of the N4 silicon used for all other Blackwell gaming GPUs.

That should mean that GB10's iGPU is much more power efficient. And that, in turn, could allow GB10—or its N1X derivative—to set a totally new standard for integrated graphics performance, even making AMD's Strix Halo look old hat.

Of course, that's a lot of "shoulds" and "coulds". Nvidia's N1X Arm chip for the PC has it all to prove. It may not even run the same iGPU die as GB10. Microsoft's version of Windows on Arm for Nvidia will need to up its x86 emulation game, literally, too, if N1X is to be any good for gaming. And the whole thing threatens to be ruined by bananas memory prices.

So, Nvidia's attempt to revolutionise PC gaming with an Arm rather than x86 CPU is still exciting. But even if it does launch in the coming months, it may take a while longer to really come good.

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