Last year, it was announced that Nvidia would be collaborating with MediaTek to work on a custom chip for the AI PC market. Speculation suggested that this new AI PC SoC would likely feature a 3nm processor from TSMC and may be built on the ARM architecture, unlike many current designs, which are based on the x86 architecture. Since Nvidia has been a leader in AI development and MediaTek has produced some powerful chips, the hype around this mystery SoC was obvious.

The two manufacturers aimed to complete the design in the third quarter and verify it in the fourth quarter of 2025, which meant that “we could see the AI-powered PC chip early next year”. And now that we are close to this expected timeframe, the Nvidia ARM chip has been spotted on Geekbench, but it certainly still seems like early days as far as performance goes.

Nvidia N1X performs close to a 2017 smartphone chip

According to the Geekbench scores, the Nvidia ARM chip, called the N1X, had a single-core score of 1,169 and a multi-core score of 2,417. These aren’t particularly impressive scores for a chip surrounded by so much hype, especially when compared to an older chip like the Apple A11 Bionic from the iPhone 8 Plus. The A11 Bionic had a single-core score of 1.114 and a multi-core score of 2.570, which means a 2017 smartphone chip is performing close to the N1X.

However, there’s a massive caveat here. This is likely an early engineering sample, and the performance we are seeing might not be final. But if these scores even represent 20% of its full performance, the N1X's results seem underwhelming, as modern ARM chips like Apple's M-series or Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite score much higher, often reaching single-core scores above 2,500 and multi-core scores well over 14,000.

An important note on the N1X is that this benchmark features a chip with just 4 cores, which has evidently hindered its multi-core performance and likely doesn’t represent the full specification. Again, this points toward the listing being an early engineering sample.

The ARM architecture doesn’t seem correct

Another interesting detail pointed out by a user on X is the ARM architecture listed as ARMv8, which seems outdated for a new Nvidia SoC designed for Windows on ARM. Modern ARM-based chips, like Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite, use ARMv9, so naturally, we would expect Nvidia’s chip to follow the same path, but that doesn't seem to be the case. That said, this could be a misidentification, as early or prototype chips sometimes don't have final firmware identifiers, so don't take these early performance and specifications as final until we get something official.

About the Author

Hassam Nasir

Hassam boasts over seven years of professional experience as a dedicated PC hardware reviewer and writer.