Nvidia’s first ARM chip for PCs, N1 and N1x, leaks and it looks like a big deal

For quite a while now, the Windows-on-Arm story has mostly been Qualcomm’s story. The company’s Snapdragon X Elite chips, built on a 4nm process with Qualcomm’s own Oryon CPU cores, brought real competition to Intel and AMD for the first time in years on thin-and-light laptops. 

Qualcomm made big claims about beating Intel Core i7 chips on multi-threaded benchmarks, and for the most part, the real-world results backed that up.

Now Nvidia wants in. And Nvidia isn’t just bringing a CPU to the fight; it’s bringing a Blackwell GPU along for the ride.

The top-tier N1X reportedly shares its core design with the GB10 processor inside Nvidia’s DGX Spark desktop AI supercomputer. That’s not a casual comparison. The full-fat N1X is said to pack a 20-core CPU — ten Cortex-X925 performance cores and ten Cortex-A725 efficiency cores — paired with a Blackwell 2.0 GPU featuring 48 Streaming Multiprocessors, which works out to 6,144 CUDA cores.

A slightly trimmed N1X variant is also in the works, dropping to 18 CPU cores (nine performance, nine efficiency) and a 40-SM GPU with 5,120 CUDA cores. Both N1X chips are designed to run at 45W to 80W. Crucially, though, that power figure covers the entire chip package: CPU and GPU together.

The standard N1 lineup is for thinner, more affordable devices. Two variants have reportedly been planned. The higher-end one pairs eight Cortex-X925 performance cores and four Cortex-A725 efficiency cores with a 20-SM GPU delivering 2,560 CUDA cores. 

The second, more entry-level option steps down to a 10-core CPU (seven performance, three efficiency) and a 16-SM GPU with 2,048 CUDA cores. The whole N1 family runs within an 18W to 45W power envelope.

The two families differ significantly under the hood. The N1X supports up to 128GB of LPDDR5X memory across a 16-channel interface, while the standard N1 caps at 64GB with an 8-channel setup. 

Likewise, N1X supports up to three M.2 SSDs, while the N1 tops out at two.

According to VideoCardz, at least one of the leaked slides is dated 2024, meaning Nvidia may have been working on this for two years or more. Not every chip listed in these documents is guaranteed to ship; roadmaps change, and some variants may quietly disappear. But the scale of what’s been leaked suggests Nvidia had serious, long-term ambitions here.

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