(Image credit: Nvidia)
Nvidia's RTX Spark won't be in a PC handheldThe new SoC is laptop-focused, according to Nvidia's CEOIt continues to feel like Team Green isn't focused on gamers anymoreNvidia’s new RTX Spark chip — its first full system on a chip — landed at Computex with a bang, as the small but mighty ARM SoC looks set to give Apple’s M5 chip a run for its money. But anyone hoping its power might come to a gaming handheld could be disappointed, and that includes me.Speaking after Spark’s announcement Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was asked if it could appear in a handheld, to which he responded, “If somebody wants to do it, you know, we'll work with them on it. But right now we're really focused on doing something that is just such a big deal, reinventing the PC after 40 years."On the one hand, this dismissive response makes some sense. While ARM is great in a lot of ways for gaming, it struggles as most titles are built to run on Intel and AMD hardware. You can still game on chips like Spark with an emulation layer that translates the software to ARM hardware, but this has a serious impact on the title’s performance.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (Image credit: Getty Images)On the other hand, Spark promises some impressive performance — with 20 cores, a GPU that matches the desktop RTX5070, and a battery life that’s "much better than anything you've seen before on RTX laptops" according to Huang, with an Nvidia exec telling us we should "expect all-day battery life."With rumors of a smaller (read: more handheld-friendly), but slightly less powerful, Spark on the way, I can’t help but feel this chip could have been the light in PC handheld’s very dark tunnel.Please don't ruin the tech I love
