Nvidia's long-rumoured APU for gaming laptops didn't emerge at the recent Computex show. But now there's talk that it could appear by the end of the year powering a new Alienware laptop and offer gaming performance on par with a RTX 4070 mobile GPU while consuming barely more than half the power.
According to a report in the United Daily News, a Taiwanese outlet, the new APU will launch either in the final quarter of 2025 or early in 2026. As previously rumoured, it's said Nvidia is producing the new chip in co-operation with MediaTek, the latter being a specialist in designing chips with Arm cores.
Intriguingly, the UDN story claims the new chip sports, "a customized Arm architecture CPU." One of the big unknowns with Nvidia's upcoming APU is the question of whether it uses off-the-shelf CPU cores designed by Arm or whether Nvidia has designed its own cores that are compatible with the Arm instruction set.
By way of example, Apple has taken the latter approach with its M series chips and currently produces what are widely agreed to be the most efficient CPU cores currently available as a consequence. Arm's in-house CPU designs are decent enough, but Nvidia-designed CPU cores would certainly be more exciting. The UDN story implies the cores will indeed be Nvidia designed, but that is yet to be proven.
Up top we mentioned how this new Nvidia chip is going into an Alienware gaming laptop. That begs two immediate questions. First, what kind of graphics hardware will it have? Second, how will it cope with existing games designed for x86 CPUs from Intel and AMD rather than Arm cores?
UDN answers the first query in part, saying that the chip will offer an integrated GPU based on Nvidia's latest Blackwell architecture as used by various RTX 50 generation GPUs, such as the RTX 5070. The publication goes on to say that the chip offers, "the same level of performance as a 120 W RTX 4070 notebook," but does so at just 65 W and will therefore represent a "breakthrough" in power efficiency that will enable smaller and lighter gaming laptops.
If that sounds exciting, the perennial problem of software compatibility remains. The chip will presumably run Windows on Arm and therefore rely on Microsoft's Prism translation layer to support legacy PC games designed for x86 CPUs.
Thus far Prism has been a bit hit and miss when running on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Arm chips for PCs. You would expect Nvidia to offer superior drivers for its Arm chip, but doubts remains over the basic approach of x86 emulation for running games.
Of course, if anyone can encourage game developers to release native Arm versions of various titles and entirely sidestep the emulation problem, it'll be Nvidia. So, if any company can make PC gaming on an Arm-based CPU viable, it's probably Nvidia. But there's still much to be proven.
Further details like the cost of the new device are also unknown. But the basic proposition of a more portable gaming laptop with much improved battery life is undeniably exciting. Nvidia's CEO has previously confirmed that an Arm-based APU for PCs is definitely coming. So, we can't wait to see what team green has come up with.
