歡迎來到 Nvidia RTX Spark 時代 ⭐

Long-time Microsoft followers will recall that it often took the company three times to get a given product right. Windows, for example, wasn't any good until Windows 3.0, and its in-house line of PCs didn't make sense until Surface Pro 3. Today, we would call this kind of thing a meme, I guess. And though it's been many years since Microsoft needing three times was broadly accepted as fact, it's difficult not to view the Nvidia RTX Spark platform in this light.
A new evolution for AI PCs
RTX Spark is all about local AI, but this is the third major milestone for local AI in Windows. The first is what Intel and Microsoft called AI PCs, which are Windows-based PCs with any kind of NPU that can enable basic on-device AI capabilities like Windows Studio Effects. The second is Copilot+ PC, which (among other things) specifies an NPU that's capable of 40+ TOPS of local AI hardware acceleration and enables a much wider range of on-device capabilities. And the third is RTX Spark, which dramatically scales the on-device AI capabilities via CUDA-compatible graphics cores in the chipset that enable on-device AI capabilities so advanced that they would have required cloud-based AI about a year ago.

This evolution makes sense, which is something of a rarity in Windows in recent years. Each tier is clearly differentiated from each other. As important, each is a superset of the tier below it. So an RTX Spark-based PC can do everything that a Copilot+ PC, an AI PC, and a normal PC can do, plus whatever its insanely powerful GPU provides. And with each tier, you can see the evolution of the PC as a platform. In time, all PCs will have NPUs. In time, they will all meet the Copilot+ PC specifications. And in time, all PCs will have the ability to perform local AI like RTX Spark PCs. What's unique and special today will someday just be what any normal PC does.

RTX Spark being a normal PC is surprisingly important, too, because one of the curious (and, retroactively, obvious) aspects of these new computers is that they're just computers. This is something I noticed last month at IFA: On one level, they're just Windows 11 PCs, and everything you know and love (or put up with) works the same as ever. There's even crapware, thanks to the PC makers, to help drive home this point. But good news: McAfee uninstalls the same way on an RTX Spark computer as it does on one with Intel chips. It is, after all, a PC.

Of course, RTX Spark computers are also more than that, too. And this is where the "three times" thing comes into play and echoes the past. It's all too easy to forget in this age of what often feels like infinite computing resources across our PCs, phones, and other devices, but when Microsoft was quickly evolving Windows throughout the late 1980s and all the 1990s, the Microsoft "three times" thing wasn't the only consistent truth. Back then, each Windows version, in turn, was more powerful than the PC hardware of the day. It wasn't so much that you...