Tuesday, May 6th 2025

NVIDIA & MediaTek Reportedly Readying "N1" Arm-based SoC for Introduction at Computex
Around late April, MediaTek confirmed that their CEO—Dr. Rick Tsai—will be delivering a big keynote speech—on May 20—at this month's Computex 2025 trade show. The company's preamble focuses on their "driving of AI innovation—from edge to cloud," but industry moles propose a surprise new product introduction during proceedings. MediaTek and NVIDIA have collaborated on a number of projects; the most visible being automative solutions. Late last year, intriguing Arm-based rumors emerged online—with Team Green allegedly working on a first time attempt at breaking into the high-end CPU consumer market segment; perhaps with the leveraging of "Blackwell" GPU architecture. MediaTek was reportedly placed in the equation, due to expertise accumulated from their devising of modern Dimensity "big core" mobile processor designs. At the start of 2025, data miners presented evidence of Lenovo seeking new engineering talent. Their job description mentioned a mysterious NVIDIA "N1x" SoC.
Further conjecture painted a fanciful picture of forthcoming "high-end N1x and mid-tier N1 (non-X)" models—with potential flagship devices launching later on this year. According to ComputerBase.de, an unannounced "GB10" PC chip could be the result of NVIDIA and MediaTek's rumored "AI PC" joint venture. Yesterday's news article divulged: "currently (this) product (can be) found in NVIDIA DGX Spark (platforms), and similarly equipped partner solutions. The systems, available starting at $3000, are aimed at AI developers who can test LLMs locally before moving them to the data center. The chip combines a 'Blackwell' GPU with a 'Grace' Arm CPU (in order) to create an SoC with 128 GB LPDDR5X, and a 1 TB or 4 TB SSD. The 'GB10' offers a GPU with one petaflop of FP4 performance (with sparsity)." ComputerBase reckons that the integrated graphics solution makes use of familiar properties—namely "5th-generation Tensor Cores and 4th-generation RT Cores"—from GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards. When discussing the design's "Grace CPU" setup, the publication's report outlined a total provision of: "20 Arm cores, including 10 Cortex-X925 and 10 Cortex-A725. The whole thing sits on a board measuring around 150 × 150 mm—for comparison: the classic NUC board format is 104 × 101 mm."ComputerBase predicts a cut-down translation of "GB10"—tailored for eventual deployment in premium laptops/notebooks, instead of small footprint AI supercomputing applications. Their inside source-laced news piece explained as follows: "a modification of this solution is also conceivable for PCs aimed at end users. Instead of 20 CPU cores, perhaps only eight to twelve, and the RAM likely to be a quarter of that or even less, i.e. 32 or 16 GB—depending on which market segment is ultimately targeted. The same applies to the GPU unit and its possible expansion levels. Instead of the $3000 entry-level price (DGX Spark) in the professional world, this should also be significantly cheaper." Citing Asian media reports, ComputerBase delved into whispers of production activities: "MediaTek has already booked additional capacity with ASE. ASE provides OSAT (outsourced semiconductor assembly and test) capacity. Moreover, a mainstream PC chip doesn't require extravagant packaging; it's a classic chip on a substrate in an FCBGA package—there's more than enough capacity for that, even from many suppliers. MediaTek is said to have awarded contracts with ASE for about a year within a few weeks, it's reported. Things seem to be getting serious."
Sources:
ComputerBase.de, Tom's Hardware, Pokde.net
Further conjecture painted a fanciful picture of forthcoming "high-end N1x and mid-tier N1 (non-X)" models—with potential flagship devices launching later on this year. According to ComputerBase.de, an unannounced "GB10" PC chip could be the result of NVIDIA and MediaTek's rumored "AI PC" joint venture. Yesterday's news article divulged: "currently (this) product (can be) found in NVIDIA DGX Spark (platforms), and similarly equipped partner solutions. The systems, available starting at $3000, are aimed at AI developers who can test LLMs locally before moving them to the data center. The chip combines a 'Blackwell' GPU with a 'Grace' Arm CPU (in order) to create an SoC with 128 GB LPDDR5X, and a 1 TB or 4 TB SSD. The 'GB10' offers a GPU with one petaflop of FP4 performance (with sparsity)." ComputerBase reckons that the integrated graphics solution makes use of familiar properties—namely "5th-generation Tensor Cores and 4th-generation RT Cores"—from GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards. When discussing the design's "Grace CPU" setup, the publication's report outlined a total provision of: "20 Arm cores, including 10 Cortex-X925 and 10 Cortex-A725. The whole thing sits on a board measuring around 150 × 150 mm—for comparison: the classic NUC board format is 104 × 101 mm."ComputerBase predicts a cut-down translation of "GB10"—tailored for eventual deployment in premium laptops/notebooks, instead of small footprint AI supercomputing applications. Their inside source-laced news piece explained as follows: "a modification of this solution is also conceivable for PCs aimed at end users. Instead of 20 CPU cores, perhaps only eight to twelve, and the RAM likely to be a quarter of that or even less, i.e. 32 or 16 GB—depending on which market segment is ultimately targeted. The same applies to the GPU unit and its possible expansion levels. Instead of the $3000 entry-level price (DGX Spark) in the professional world, this should also be significantly cheaper." Citing Asian media reports, ComputerBase delved into whispers of production activities: "MediaTek has already booked additional capacity with ASE. ASE provides OSAT (outsourced semiconductor assembly and test) capacity. Moreover, a mainstream PC chip doesn't require extravagant packaging; it's a classic chip on a substrate in an FCBGA package—there's more than enough capacity for that, even from many suppliers. MediaTek is said to have awarded contracts with ASE for about a year within a few weeks, it's reported. Things seem to be getting serious."
28 Comments on NVIDIA & MediaTek Reportedly Readying "N1" Arm-based SoC for Introduction at Computex
Presumably if the two x86 vendors do come under significant threat from ARM offerings, the first thing to do is trim down the ISA so that it emulates more of the legacy stuff like all the ARM cores do. I'm a little outside my wheelhouse with CPU architecture discussions but AFAIK the reason ARM can compete on efficiency and performance is because it doesn't have 30 years of x86 baggage it needs to support. Feel free to correct me if that's not the reality. I guess you haven't used Intel's 225 or 226 ethernet adapters then. Intel's ability to execute these days is so bad that they're making wired ethernet adapters that drop out!
As for the processors, Mediatek are fine. They're in use in a bunch of phones from Oppo, Poco, RedMi, Samsung. I've seen them in loads of tablets from Lenovo and Samsung as well as a few budget brands - we buy cheap tablets for construction sites because iPads walk off by themselves and never come back. A £100 Samsung can sit on a table for a week and nobody wants to steal it even though it'll open the same PDFs as the iPad for quick markup.