It's Not Just About the Price

It’s Computex week, and that means there is a lot of PC news to take in right now. Nvidia has announced RTX Spark, its Apple silicon competitor for notebooks and small desktops. This puts Nvidia in the same market as Qualcomm building Arm chips for PCs. Here’s Sean Hollister: “This is the most efficient PC chip ever built,” says Nvidia senior director of product management Mark Aevermann — without sharing so much as a single statistic or chart to back that up. […] Like Apple and Qualcomm’s chips, this Nvidia chip is Arm-based silicon, meaning legacy Windows software made for Intel and AMD’s x86 processors needs to run through an emulation layer to work. That can mean lower performance. But Microsoft has now spent years getting Windows and its Prism emulator ready for Qualcomm and now Nvidia chips, and Nvidia claims its own graphics and AI chops will take the idea further than ever before. Microsoft, Asus, Dell, HP, MSI, and Lenovo have all committed to building RTX Spark notebooks,…