With Nvidia’s graphics cards now unaffordable for all but the most-desperate gamers, the king of CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is still trying to make its first laptops work in 2026. Unfortunately, we may not see Nvidia’s processors for PCs until many months down the line. That could pose a problem for a company that seems to care more and more about AI, and AI only.
We’ve been witness to a legion of leaks all supporting the identity of Nvidia’s first CPUs, titled N1 and N1X. Over this past weekend, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang finally confirmed it was making these chips during an interview with Taiwanese outlet UDN (read via machine translation). The black-jacketed head of what’s now the wealthiest company in the world said that Nvidia was working with chipmaker MediaTek on a brand new SoC (system on a chip). The N1 would be built for productivity machines, but the N1X could ostensibly bear the graphical juice for gaming on a mobile machine.
Nvidia’s N1 could miss most of the year
Previous leaks suggested the N1X may equal that of a modern RTX 5050 GPU at lower wattages. What’s less promising is just how long it could take to get there. Noted leaker Moore’s Law Is Dead published several videos this week to his YouTube channel where he claimed Nvidia could be delaying the launch of its new chips until later, even as late as summer this year.
Other relatively reliable sources like Digitimes suggested we could see some laptops in spring this year, with more slated for summer. A spring release is looking more and more unlikely with Mobile World Conference 2026 coming and no sign of an N1 chip in sight. Summer will be late considering the competition. While AMD has new Ryzen AI Max chips built for gaming this year, Intel is the one company leading the pack for both performance and efficiency on its Panther Lake laptops. The gaming performance and battery life we’ve seen from these machines are significantly better than we’ve seen from other laptops at lower power.
These Nvidia APUs (accelerated processing units with CPU and GPU capabilities) could still appear in these Lenovo Legion and Yoga products posted by noted dataminer Huang514613 on X. There’s the suggestion we’ll get another Dell Premium 16 model with all Nvidia inside as well. Previous leaks supported the idea that Alienware was also developing an N1X laptop. (At CES 2026, the Dell-owned gaming brand showed off a lightweight gaming laptop that it refused to explain or even allow press to take photos of.)
There’s so much evidence these machines exist, but the fact we haven’t seen hide nor hair of them yet is concerning. Moore’s Law Is Dead’s anonymous sources further claim Nvidia is dealing with a mountain of bugs and compatibility issues with Windows 11. Delay after delay will only exacerbate pricing problems when RAM costs have increased exponentially.
We don’t know how N1 stacks up
The N1 chip will be an ARM-based processor. That’s a RISC-based microarchitecture that has long promised to sport battery efficiency for the same performance as Intel and AMD’s near-monopoly on x86 computer architecture. The other major ARM-based chipmaker, Qualcomm, launched its latest Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Plus platforms for this year’s slate of lightweight laptops. These also promise strong graphics performance, but Nvidia’s expertise with accelerated graphics on its CUDA platform promises it could somehow do better than the competition. The problem is, we won’t know until Nvidia shows us something—anything—about these supposed laptop chips.
Nvidia—which has become extremely profitable off the back of its AI training chips—has not done enough to keep GPU prices anywhere near reasonable. There’s a large faction of the PC and gaming communities that feel abandoned by Nvidia as it pumps more air into the AI bubble. If, or when, that bubble bursts, Nvidia should make sure there is still an audience left to help it pick up the pieces.
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