Alienware is already on board to create a gaming laptop that uses only Nvidia.

Nvidia has been making Arm processors for more than a year. But how they will be built, in what form, and which market they will target have remained a mystery. There's good news for gamers, as rumour has it that these chips will be used in low-power, but decently performing, gaming laptops.

This rumour comes from the tech YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead (MLID), which means you can start cranking those salt and pepper grinders. According to a source at an Nvidia Partner, the chip "targets up to 80 W", while MLID quotes an unknown source saying, "Behind-the-scenes, Nvidia compares their new APU with an RTX 4700 laptop GPU that runs at 65W in gaming performance."

This is not all. According to MLID again, the Nvidia partner previously quoted also claims that Nvidia " or at leastpartners with Dell under Alienware" for the new Arm APU. This would presumably mean a low-power, high-performance Alienware gaming notebook using an Nvidia GPU and CPU.

MLID quotes a Nvidia source saying, "We're trying to hurry this thing out at the very latest by 2025 or 2026". This is in line with what we heard before, that a Nvidia APU would be in production by 2025.

According to the Nvidia source, this chip will be a "direct rival to AMD's Halo APUs", and it will have a powerful NPU. MLID clarifies, "They think it will have Strix Halo performance or maybe a little less".

It's a given that the NPU will have one. Nvidia and AI are like Cherry and Bakewell, or Apple and Pie to the Americans. But an Nvidia RTX 4070 APU that can compete with AMD Strix Halo with mobile-level performance? This is the real surprise here, and it certainly tickles me.

AMD's Strix Halo (AKA Ryzen AI 300 Max) chips will be the most powerful mobile chips that hit the market. They feature a healthy dose of RDNA 3.5 computing units. The latest leaks indicate that AMD will release at least three of these chips, with the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, the highest-end chip, boasting 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units and 16 CPU cores.

The Z1 Extreme APU, found in handhelds like the Asus ROG Ally X, has 12 RDNA3 CUs and eight cores. Although it's not apples-to-apples, the RX7700 XT features 54 CUs.

Strix Halo offers mobile chips that are close to the performance of high-end discrete graphics cards. If Nvidia is competing against this, it would make sense that they ensure their upcoming Arm APU has graphics performance similar to an RTX-4070 mobile GPU.

It is not clear whether the chips will be manufactured by Intel or TSMC, but Microsoft's Qualcomm only Windows on Arm deal, which was rumoured soon to end, may make it possible to find out sooner than later. It makes sense, if this deal is about to expire, that Nvidia would partner with Qualcomm rival MediaTek to produce these chips.

If this is true, the Alienware part could be another exciting aspect. This is because a gaming laptop with all Nvidia graphics would only work if Windows on Arm was up to scratch.

According to MLID’s supposed Nvidia sources, "there's a HUGE amount of effort underway to make this work". I can also kind of believe it, given that all sorts of improvements are underway. For example, an Insider Build of Windows now supports AVX and AVX2 instruction sets, which should get more Windows on Arm games up and running. Could Nvidia APU be the catalyst for a proper transition from Arm x Windows gaming to Windows on Arm? Let's see.