Microsoft and NVIDIA Jointly Tease Possible N1X Debut as a “New Era of PC”

Microsoft and NVIDIA, through their X handles, each teased “A new era of PC,” along with the map coordinates “25.0528, 121.5990,” which correspond to the Nangang Exhibition Centre, the seat of Computex 2026. If it wasn’t obvious already, NVIDIA is announcing its much awaited N1X client PC processor, and it has the full blessings of Microsoft to power Windows 11 AI PCs with full Copilot+ acceleration. The N1X is widely expected to get NVIDIA to supplant Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite series as the fastest Arm-based processor for Windows, powering experiences on par with high-end x86-64 PC processors from Intel and AMD.

NVIDIA is allegedly building the N1X on the TSMC 3 nm foundry node. The latest leaks hold the chip to be a 20-core processor, with an Arm big.LITTLE configuration of 10 performance cores, and 10 efficiency cores. All 20 cores are custom-designed by NVIDIA, and based on the Arm v9.2 machine architecture. The CPU complex is expected to feature 32 MB of shared, last-level cache. The star attraction here is the iGPU that allegedly doubles up as an NPU. Based on the “Blackwell” graphics architecture, the iGPU is expected to feature up to 48 streaming multiprocessors (SM) for 6,144 CUDA cores, and performance possibly comparable to the discrete GeForce RTX 5060 Ti. The chip will feature LPDDR5X interface, with a unified memory architecture. NVIDIA’s plan is to outclass Apple M5 Pro and AMD Ryzen AI Max 400. There’s nothing in this class from Intel, unless the company decides to build chips with large iGPUs based on its Xe3 “Celestial” architecture.