NVIDIA N1X suddenly appears on geekbench; brings competitive performance thanks to arm core

The NVIDIA-MediaTek 'alliance' looks set to challenge the mainstream desktop and laptop processor market with its promising N1 chip. Although NVIDIA did not showcase the CPU at Computex, more and more information about the chip is appearing online. This also underscores the seriousness of 'Team Green' in bringing more affordable CPUs to the mass market.

Unlike the DGX Spark, the NVIDIA N1X won't be as powerful as the chip, which is aimed at mainstream users. However, it looks like NVIDIA is planning to equip the N1X with the same number of ARM cores as the GB200, as spotted on Geekbench. The NVIDIA N1X is said to be aimed at the desktop, while the N1 is for mobile platforms.

Analysts had previously predicted the N1X would have an 8- or 12-core configuration, but it looks like NVIDIA wants it to be a mobile variant of the GB200 with 10 ARM Cortex-X925 cores and 10 ARM Cortex-A725 cores. According to information posted on Geekbench, the system used appears to be from HP, running Ubuntu 24.04.1 and with 128GB of system RAM. The base clock speed is listed as 2.81GHz, but details suggest a boost clock of around 4GHz, which helped the N1X score 3,096 in the single-core test and 18,837 in the multi-core test.

It's worth noting that Geekbench 6 scores aren't exactly reliable and tend to vary widely between tests. However, given that this is the first publicly available benchmark result for the N1X, it's safe to assume that the chip will compete with current-generation AMD and Intel processors. The scores are in the same range as the 2nd-gen Core Ultra series and the Zen 5-based Strix Halo processors - pretty impressive!

NVIDIA is still giving out more details about the N1 series. Hopefully this processor line can arrive this year, bringing a breath of fresh air to the relatively gloomy market.