After more than a week of living and breathing Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip, I’m impressed by how much AI, creative and gaming power it packs into such a tiny space

Having been at Nvidia's RTX Spark event in San Francisco earlier this month, I was lucky enough to get a firsthand walk through of the many things the 'superchip' can do.

Since then I've spent almost every waking moment putting the ARM-based RTX Spark through its paces and seeing what makes it so different from other chipsets that have come before.

The RTX Spark is Nvidia’s first System on a Chip (SoC).

Combining an 18-core CPU and 5120 Cuda core Blackwell RTX GPU all in one, or a 20-core CPU and 6144-core GPU for its meatier version, it offers an integrated chipset in the vein of Apple’s M series chips.

While Apple’s silicon is known for its oomph, that Blackwell RTX GPU means you’ll also get considerable gaming performance here to boot.

How does this translate in terms of raw numbers? It’s certainly got a lot going on under the hood, as the RTX Spark N1X chip I’ve been playing around with squeezes 20 cores into its CPU.

While the 2,623 single-core performance I clocked on Geekbench 7.1 falls somewhat short of the 4,288 we got for Apple’s M5 chip, its 21,899 multi-core score massively outstripped the latter’s 17,926.

That means that for tasks like content creation, software development and AI, you should be able to expect more oomph in your corner.

So given the potential it promises across agentic AI, creative workflows and gaming, let’s take a look at how it performs across each of those areas in turn.

Hybrid agentic AI (Image credit: Future) During the launch of Nvidia’s RTX Spark SoC, there was a huge focus on its potential for hybrid agentic AI.

Now, cloud-based AI models are undoubtedly pretty powerful but I absolutely have security concerns about uploading my most private data to the cloud and I’m not entirely sure I want to blindly trust the companies behind some of these models.

Using local, open-source models that I can vet myself and that never transmit sensitive data outside of my network feels like a much safer alternative — but not everybody necessarily wants to cut themselves off from the power of frontier models.

That’s why Nvidia has introduced a hybrid-system for the RTX Spark instead.

Instead, the hybrid-workflow that the RTX Spark supports allows you to select your choice of local models and ring-fence them for certain parts of an agentic workflow, while outsourcing specific, demanding tasks to cloud frontier models.