With all the RTX 50-series chatter coming out of CES 2025, it might be easy to forget that we've been hoping for Nvidia to announce something else this year: namely, an all-Nvidia Arm laptop chip. On that front, it seems we now finally have confirmation that such a thing is in the works and seemingly just around the corner.
According to HardwareLuxx, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang confirmed during a Q&A that Nvidia is working with MediaTek to create an end-user system on a chip (SoC) based on the just-announced Project Digits mini home-user AI supercomputer. An "end-user system" would presumably mean a mobile chip that could be used in a laptop.
Huang reportedly said: "We're going to make this a mainstream product. We'll support it with all the things that we do to support professional and high-quality software, and the PC (manufacturers) will make it available to end users."
Given the context, by "this", Huang presumably means the GB10 chip at the heart of the Project Digits mini supercomputer, though likely with different core configurations, GPU core counts, etc. In other words, it seems like he's saying we'll be seeing a (presumably scaled-back) version of this SoC hitting the end-user market, via PC manufacturers.
The GB10 SoC in the Project Digits supercomputer—like a GB100, sans a zero, geddit?—features a Blackwell GPU capable of one petaFLOP of FP4 AI compute and a Grace CPU with 20 Arm cores, plus 128 GB of LPDDR5X memory and up to 4 TB of NVMe storage.
The GB10, Nvidia says, is the "world’s Smallest AI Supercomputer Capable of Running 200B-Parameter Models". It's primarily for students, researchers, and hobbyists to try out powerful local AI that kind of replicates cloud-based AI, and all this runs on a Linux-based DGX operating system.
The GB10 is much more powerful than the Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano that Nvidia announced in December 2024, which is only capable of 67 INT8 TOPS. Project Digits is much more worthy of the "supercomputer" name, and that's probably why it costs $3,000 while Jetson Orin Nano costs just $249.
The idea that Nvidia might make an end-user SoC with Arm CPU cores in collaboration with MediaTek isn't new. In fact, it's one of the things we've been excited about potentially seeing in 2025, as it could mean getting our hands on an all-Nvidia laptop. We'd heard rumours of such chips going into production in 2025 since at least November last year, and we'd even heard talk of the first such SoC having RTX 4070 mobile and Strix Halo-level performance.
Of course, all that performance talk is still speculation, but it seems that what's not speculation now is that Nvidia's working on bringing an Nvidia x MediaTek SoC to market as a "mainstream product." And now that we have the actual GB10 chip that can act as a springboard for consumer chips, we might not have to wait too long.
HardwareLuxx mentions Computex 2025 (at the end of May) as a possible time for Nvidia to introduce such end-user mobile chips, and this might make sense. Nothing definite, of course, but here's hoping.
