Nvidia’s N1X SoC has resurfaced in a new Geekbench test, showing the chip’s CPU and GPU configurations alongside early performance results. The brand’s first high-end consumer SoC is set to offer much higher performance than previous Tegra chips, targeting demanding tasks and gaming. Though the silicon has been rumoured to be facing some manufacturing hurdles, it seems that early samples are already being tested.
Said to be targeting desktops and laptops, the N1X is a custom in-house solution made by Nvidia, featuring 10 Cortex X925 plus 10 Cortex A725 CPU cores alongside 48 GPU compute units – i.e. 6,144 CUDA cores, based on the ARM v9.2 and Blackwell architectures. If this rings a bell, it’s because it matches the specs of the GB10 Superchip found on the brand’s DGX Spark.
Assuming Nvidia doesn’t change the design compared to its GB10 Superchip, the N1X could be paired with up to 128GB of LPDDR5X memory on a 256-bit bus, sharing 170W on the SoC. That said, contrary to GB10, N1X is expected to run on Linux and Windows on ARM instead of Nvidia’s DGX OS. The latter is an optimised version of Ubuntu Linux designed for Nvidia’s DGX systems, focusing on machine learning and analytics.
Though not representative of the final product, this result indicates the N1X’s GPU delivers RTX 2050-levels of performance. While surprising considering its CUDA core count is equivalent to a desktop RTX 5070, we must keep in mind that the N1X is highly constrained both by frequency and power, and perhaps even cooling. According to Geekbench’s report, the N1X’s GPU is clocked at 1,048MHz, which is 58% lower than the RTX 5070. Furthermore, while the desktop RTX 5070 gets to enjoy 250W alone, the N1X’s 20 ARM cores and GPU must share power, likely the same 120W as GB10.
This also appears to be early silicon running on unoptimsed software. Given enough power and cooling to spread its wings, this chip could perhaps reach performance akin to the RTX 5070 mobile, which gets a maximum of 100W TGP. Overall, N1X should perform like the GB10, at least in AI tasks, again assuming Nvidia doesn’t change the design.
Regarding availability, Nvidia has yet to share any date. If we had to guess, we would bet on next year’s CES where brands tend to show their latest products, some of which may be powered by the N1X SoC.
