From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
So, not satisfied with just dominating the GPU market, Nvidia now
wants to take on Intel and be your main CPU too. They've announced
their "RTX Spark" system-on-a-chip (SOC) which will include an RTX
5000 series GPU and an ARM CPU, and want to use it in the
Windows-based PC market. *
It'll be a tough sell. Arguably ARM may be the future of modern PCs,
but right now x86/x64 chips produced by Intel and AMD are the
standard, and there is a lot of inertia in that market. With shims
like GameNative, you can get a lot of older software running on ARM
without a rewrite, and though the performance loss isn't quite as bad
as you might expect, there /is/ a definite hit. And not everything
runs flawlessly in emulated layers either. Power-users aren't going to
flock to RTX Sparks... but they aren't really the target anyway.
Instead, nvidia is more likely to aim at low-end laptops and handheld
PCs; they're going after Chromebook and SteamDeck users. The strategy
is to build out an audience from the bottom up so that sheer numbers
will force publishers to start publishing native ARM applications, and
then the performance hit between x86 and ARM apps will be less
noticeable.
Nvidia has a 5 trillion dollar market-cap; ten times what Intel is
worth. I don't know if it will work, but they have the money to throw
away at such a strategy, and if it pays off... it'll really pay off.
Myself, I'm resistant to the idea (and ARM in general), although less
because of any dislike of ARM and more because I enjoy the long
backwards compatibility of x86 processors. Unfortunately, that's not
really something that matters to most people so the fact that won't be
able to install DOS 6.2 on your newest nvidia Spark RTX laptop
probably won't be of any concern to them. But it bothers me.
Would you consider moving to a computer with a nvidia CPU/SOC if the performance was good enough and the price equitable?
* story
https://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/rtx-spark
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