TECH NEWS – Demand for the Nvidia RTX Spark is so high that major tech companies are looking for alternatives.

The average consumer has been priced out of the market due to the unchecked rise in memory prices, yet machines capable of performing AI tasks are flying off the shelves. OpenAI is reportedly purchasing thousands of Apple Mac mini and Mac Studio units. Another report indicates that Nvidia RTX Spark chips are already in short supply, even before their expected release in PCs this fall. Earlier this year, Apple’s Mac mini and Mac Studio models reportedly flew off the shelves because their unified memory architecture and new low-latency Thunderbolt 5 feature proved to be a winning formula for in-device agent coordination. The Thunderbolt 5 feature bypasses the standard TCP/IP network layer, enabling extremely fast, low-latency PC-to-PC connections.

According to The Information, OpenAI has purchased tens of thousands of Apple Mac mini and Mac Studio devices in the past few months alone, presumably for reinforcement learning and agent tasks. In fact, it appears that even Anthropic is renting such Apple devices through Amazon AWS. Apple unveiled the new M6 Mac mini and an updated version of the M5 Ultra Mac Studio last week. These models are expected to trigger another surge in demand among booming AI labs. Meanwhile, according to Taiwan’s Economic Daily, the initial shipment of Nvidia’s RTX Spark superchip has sold out. Asus, MSI, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft have all purchased N1x systems.

Nvidia’s new RTX Spark (N1x) platform uses TSMC’s 3-nanometer manufacturing technology. It features a 20-core Grace CPU and a Blackwell RTX 5070 GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores. This configuration can deliver up to one petaflop of FP4 AI performance. The platform includes up to 128 GB of LPDDR5X-based unified memory. It provides approximately 600 GB/s of NVLink-C2C bandwidth between the CPU and GPU. The RTX Spark supports the full Nvidia software suite, including CUDA, TensorRT, DLSS, Reflex, G-Sync, and RTX ray tracing. The 20-core Grace CPU in the N1x variant consists of 10 ARM Cortex-X925 cores and 10 ARM Cortex-A725 cores. The N1 variant, on the other hand, features a 12-core CPU consisting of eight ARM Cortex-X925 cores and four ARM Cortex-A725 cores. The N1 variant also has a GeForce RTX 5050 GPU and up to 64 GB of unified memory.

Nvidia RTX Spark-based PCs are expected to debut this fall, and the N1x systems are reportedly priced at $3,400. Both Asus and MSI have exhausted their initial shipment allocation and are requesting additional shipments from Nvidia. According to Hu Shubin, Asus’s co-chairman, resellers have pre-ordered the new RTX Spark series products at a higher rate than expected. This is a remarkable achievement, considering the systems’ high prices.

It seems that buyers don’t view these systems as ordinary PCs but rather as rare products featuring a complete Nvidia configuration in a portable computer.

Source: WCCFTech,The Information,UDN