Nvidia may be on the brink of launching its first consumer Arm-based SoC, as a new engineering motherboard leak shows what is believed to be the N1 SoC chip. Spotted at Goofish second-hand marketplace, the board photos show an SoC made of two silicon tiles flanked by eight memory chips.
In late January, Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, publicly acknowledged that the company is working with MediaTek on a very powerful system-on-a-chip (SoC) with low power consumption but excellent performance, designed specifically for computers with robust AI capabilities. In this collaboration, MediaTek would bring its expertise in Arm CPUs, while Nvidia would take care of the GPU part.
The N1 chip series is believed to be similar, if not identical, to the GB10 Blackwell ‘superchip’ powering Nvidia’s DGX Spark. It is expected to power laptops and potentially compact desktop devices, offering a serious alternative to Intel and AMD’s x86 chips and Qualcomm’s Arm SoCs.
Assuming Nvidia doesn’t change the design compared to the GB10, the N1 would likely pack 20 Arm cores split across two clusters (10 big + 10 efficient cores) using Armv9-class Cortex technology. For the GPU portion, we can expect 6,144 CUDA cores based on the latest Blackwell architecture, potentially delivering desktop RTX 5070-class performance if clocked high enough. Nvidia is reportedly planning at least two variants, one of which is believed to feature the full 20-core design, made using TSMC’s N3B node.
Going back to the leaked pictures, we can see the supposed N1 SoC alongside eight memory packages marked SK Hynix H58G78CK8B. While there is no public datasheet matching this exact model on the manufacturer’s website, the closest part seems to be a 16GB LPDDR5T/LPDDR5X module reaching up to 8,533MT/s. Times eight, this would confirm the rumoured 128GB unified memory capacity.
Main components aside, the pictures show that the motherboard is equipped with onboard WiFi and Bluetooth, two M.2 slots for 2240-format SSDs, one USB Type-C, one USB Type-A, one HDMI, plus a 3.5mm audio jack.
While nothing is official yet, rumours indicate that Nvidia may target the second half of 2026, in partnership with Dell and Lenovo. If correct, we may see more competition from Arm-based devices, possibly rivalling Apple’s M-series chips. Though not confirmed, these N1 laptops will likely be powered by Microsoft’s Windows on Arm. Computex seems to be a reasonable announcement opportunity, so stay tuned.
