Unofficially, the NVIDIA RTX Spark has already been making its rounds around the benchmark circuit, appearing on programs like Cinebench 2026 on a Surface Laptop Ultra, and even on a Lenovo Yoga 9-in-1. Now, there is a possibility that NVIDIA may have an 18-core variant of its ARM-based mainstream processor.
As to why this is important, here’s the lightning run through: the RTX Spark was physically built in partnership with MediaTek. During its announcement at Computex 2026, NVIDIA said that the SoC is made up of the 20 Grace CPU cores; 6,144 Blackwell RTX GPU cores, and 5th generation Tensor Cores; and 128GB of Unified Memory.
During out tech demo session after that, NVIDIA reps did not state if the company would be releasing any other configuration besides the 20-core SKU, although we did eye some copy that suggested the GPU did indeed have other variants of the RTX Spark in the pipeline.
Getting back on point, the Geekbench 7 performance of the two processors have already been removed, but not before the internet caught screenshots of their performance. For the 20-core, it scored 2,570 points on the single-core test and 23,316 points on the multi-core test. The 18-core score 2,541 points on single-core and 21,776 points on multi-core.
By comparison, the 20-core RTX Spark pulls ahead of the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 by approximately 6% on single core and 12% multi-core test. That’s a processor that we reviewed more than a year ago and still one of the most impressive APUs we’ve played with, up until it was dethroned by Intel’s Panther Lake, both in the laptop and gaming handheld form factors.
On that note, the 20-core RTX Spark is seemingly slower than the Core Ultra X9 388H in the Geekbench 7 single core test by 7%, but overtook it by 20% in the multi-core test. Impressive as that is, NVIDIA’s APU is still trails behind Apple’s own 18-core CPU and 40-core GPU M5 Max processor.
Specifically, the 20-core RTX Spark trails behind by the M5 Max by 32% in single-core test and 35% in the multi-core test. In any case, it’s important to remember that Geekbench is more of a guideline of a processor’s prowess, and not necessarily a general litmus test for hardware. To really find out, we’ll need to test an RTX Spark-powered laptop, as and when it becomes available.
(Source: Geekbench (removed), Videocardz)
