When the river sounds, it carries water. And rumors of NVIDIA launching its own processors for home computers have been around since at least a couple of years ago. Well, the arrival of Jensen Huang’s company in this segment is imminent and represents a total challenge to the hegemony of Intel and AMD and the x86 architecture. What’s more, it points to a paradigm shift in how we will understand Windows personal computers in the coming years. Bottom line: think Apple Silicon.
The context. To date, Intel and AMD have divided the Windows laptop pie and ARM architecture It was intended either for more or less affordable and basic computers with Chromebook and MediaTek or for an expensive MacBook. It is true that already is there a powerful laptop with Qualcomm Snapdragon under the hood that runs Windows, but the arrival of NVIDIA chips this first quarter of 2026 wants to be the definitive push.
Thus, these ambitious and powerful teams will not equip an NVIDIA GPU with an Intel CPU as we have been seeing for years, but rather they will have an NVIDIA SoC (actually, there are two models: N1 and N1X). Simply put, NVIDIA takes care of two essential pieces of hardware.
Why is it important. NVIDIA wants to do with Windows what Apple has achieved with its M chips, an ecosystem where the processor and graphics are integrated and understood wonderfully, which is noticeable in issues such as battery consumption, efficiency or performance itself. The blessed convergence.
For years, if you wanted a powerful computer for gaming or work, you had to choose between Intel or AMD and the x86 architecture, but NVIDIA enters a china shop like an elephant with the ARM architecture and its advantages: more efficiency, less heating and longer battery life. Until now, finding a reliable gaming device to play with was a pipe dream, but the N1X chip with the Blackwell architecture of the RTX 50 wants to change it. And furthermore, you could do it on more stylized equipment. On the other hand, these chips use unified memory (up to 128 GB LPDDR5X), which means fewer bottlenecks in demanding tasks such as gaming, local AI or video editing.
What has escaped. A leak from Lenovo has revealed that the company has manufactured six laptops with the N1 and N1X processors, including a 15-inch gaming device. An X/Twitter user has published the list of the teams. The user’s profile is completely anonymous, not that it does not inspire much confidence, but there is more: this page updates The Legion control software already shows the existence of a “Legion 7 15N1X11” laptop where the “N1X” is precisely the NVIDIA SoC.
Besides, The Verge has discovered already indexed and protected Lenovo content that refers to products with these processors. And not just Lenovo: Dell has also missed a premium device with NVIDIA N1X on its website, such as another X/Twitter user swiped. just a couple of days ago Digitimes gave to date: It will be this spring, although more devices will arrive this summer. After suffer a delayit seems that they will finally become a reality and will not stop here: the company already has the N2 and N2X on its roadmap for the end of 2027.
Product descriptions with NVIDIA SoCs already appear on the Lenovo website
The processors. There is little information about these components beyond a Geekbench leak that must be taken with tweezers. We know that the most powerful and aimed at models with more muscle is the N1X and rumors suggest that it has a 20-core CPU and an integrated GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores (with Blackwell architecture). However, the CEO of NVIDIA already confirmed than the N1 and the superchip GB10 They are practically the same. The N1 is simply a more modest chip focused on thermal efficiency and battery life and aimed at ultrabooks and mid-range.
The first laptops with NVIDIA chips. The leaked devices that will debut with SoC from the company led by Huang will be eight: a Lenovo Legion 7 (15N1X11) gaming laptop with the N1X chip, the Lenovo Yoga 9 and Yoga Pro 7 convertibles with two versions to choose between N1X and N1, the IdeaPad Slim 5 in 14 and 16-inch versions with the N1 chip and the Dell “Premium 16”, probably XPS or Alienware, with an OLED screen and chip N1X.
NVIDIA is not new to this. Lenovo is the largest PC manufacturer in the world (as collects Statista) and that it launches several models of its most important families means that it has strong reasons to trust that the performance of NVIDIA chips is up to par. However, NVIDIA’s ARM PC chips have been a long time coming, but that does not mean that it is a newbie in the sector, it is worth remembering that the switch It has a Tegra SoC and that this line has previously been the brain of tablets and even the Microsoft Surface or the Shield for TV.
It is the beginning of a new cold war. And if confirmed, Microsoft’s desire would be fulfilled: the Windows on arm as a real alternative to Apple’s Macbook. The first quarter is not only the launch date, it can become a before and after between NVIDIA, Apple, AMD and Qualcomm for control of the computers of the future.
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Cover | Hillel Steinberg
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