Nvidia is seemingly on track to offer a worthy ARM alternative to the x86 offering of AMD and Intel. The brand’s ‘N1x’ chip has broken cover in Geekbench, boasting single and multi core performance akin to Ryzen 7 9800X3D.
There was no mention of ‘N1x’ at Computex 2025, despite the storied number of rumours surrounding the consumer processor. However, the CPU has since appeared in an HP ‘8EA3’ motherboard and 128GB of RAM at its back.
Putting the 20-core processor through its paces, it achieved a single-core score of 3,096 and reached 18,837 in multi-core. This makes it most comparable to Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but not far off Core Ultra 9 285K. Placing N1x up against other ARM CPUs, it’s roughly 10-31% ahead of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite but this is 20 cores up against 12.
Of course, we should take the above results with a pinch of salt. There’s no telling whether this performance is indicative of final silicon, not forgetting the synthetic nature of Geekbench benchmarks. Real-world performance could prove drastically different, particularly as x86 processors benefit from greater compatibility with Windows and Linux applications.
Nvidia hasn’t disclosed any specifications regarding N1x, but it will likely mirror the brand’s GB10 Superchip. This would equip the chip with 10 Cortex-X925 plus 10 Cortex-A725 cores, which (according to Geekbench) boost up to 4.05GHz from a 2.81GHz base frequency.
There’s no doubting Nvidia’s ability to produce powerful hardware, but its ARM CPU faces an uphill battle regardless of its performance. The dominance of x86 instruction sets can’t be overstated, but this chip could prove a watershed moment.
