Fourteen years ago, Microsoft’s Surface PC flopped spectacularly, thanks to Nvidia’s Arm chip that couldn’t run existing Windows apps. Now, Nvidia is betting big on its RTX Spark laptops, claiming they can run everything from Adobe to Blender, even with kernel-level anti-cheat games.

The RTX Spark superchip isn’t a brand-new piece of silicon; it’s the same chip used for AI developers last year, but now it runs full Windows 11 with Microsoft’s Prism emulator, making old Windows apps and games work on the Arm chip.

Nvidia isn’t the first to extend PC software onto a non-native platform. Apple moved its computers to Arm-based silicon in 2020, and Valve’s SteamOS proved the potential of Windows games on Linux. But Nvidia wants to leapfrog them all, particularly in AI and gaming.

The RTX Spark has more graphics horsepower than Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops, and Nvidia is working with games companies to enable practically every anti-cheat solution. However, some CPU-limited games will run slower due to the conversion of x86 instructions to Arm in real time. Most games, though, are limited by their graphics, and we’re seeing smooth 1080p performance in games like Cyberpunk 2077.

In a normal year, Nvidia might have been content with its RTX Spark laptops simply working. But now, it’s making hundreds of billions in profit from the AI gold rush, driving memory and storage prices sky-high.