Can reinventing the PC actually make a difference? NVIDIA thinks it does

NVIDIA’s new RTX Spark chip is expected to revolutionize what PCs can do with Jensen Huang, believing it’s the biggest change to the PC in its 40-year history.

During the press Q and A session at NVIDIA GTC Taipei, Jensen Huang explained a lot more about the announcements NVIDIA made as well as the plans the company has for the future. He also shared a few candid moments with journalists, including signing a saucer for one journalist who had his birthday and made a comment on how NVIDIA pays it employees.

The more crucial questions were on Vera Rubin, NVIDIA RTX Spark, AI agents and NVIDIA’s supply chain.

Looking specifically on NVIDIA RTX Spark and how it is expected to revolutionize the PC industry, NVIDIA RTX Spark powers the world’s first Windows PCs purpose-built for personal agents, featuring 1 petaflop of AI performance, industry-leading power efficiency, full-stack NVIDIA AI and graphics technology, and up to 128GB of unified memory.

NVIDIA has collaborated with MediaTek to develop the chip with Microsoft deliver a native Windows experience for personal agents, including new security primitives and NVIDIA OpenShell to run agents securely on primary devices. The new chip lets creators, AI developers and gamers render ultralarge 90GB+ 3D scenes, edit 12K 4:2:2 video, generate 4K AI videos, run 120B-parameter LLMs with up to 1 million tokens context using agents locally, and play AAA games at 1440p and over 100 frames per second.

While the pricing of these devices have yet to be announced, the RTX Spark-powered slim Windows laptops with all-day battery life and premium displays, as well as compact desktop PCs are expected to be available this fall from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft Surface and MSI, with models from Acer and GIGABYTE to follow.

Reinventing the PC

Huang was quick to point out that the PC will remain as what it is meant to do be and do for everyone.

“If we were too abrupt in changing either the UX, too abrupt in changing maybe even the name and its positioning, maybe people who believe they still need a PC, might have a harder time on that journey. These are some of the complexities of new product lines,” he said when asked if the industry should be looking at a new term for the modern pc.

According to Huang, if there is a chance to reinvent the single most important tool of humanity, NVIDIA is not going to sit around and not let it get done.

“The question is, can we make a contribution? Look, we built graphics cards and we do it insanely well and still love doing it today. To create a computer like this one that runs CUDA, OpenGL, DirectX, it runs tensors, to do that and to do it incredibly well, well, as it turns out, not one computer in the world exists that can do that today. And so it took us three years working with Microsoft and two and a half years working with MediaTek to get here. That's how hard it is. And that's why everybody's so excited about it. We are now literally at a new beginning with a whole new line of products,” Huang said.

For Huang, NVIDIA has made a huge contribution to shaping how personal computing will work.

“Today, that computer sits there waiting for us to use it. Our computer sits at our desk waiting for us to use it. In the future, when we leave it, we’ll be talking with our agents on mobile devices and its going to be talking back,” he said on how the future of PCs could be like.