RTX Spark: Second lower-end config confirmed via latest driver

Nvidia announced the ARM-based RTX Spark chip on May 31, as well as the initial set of laptops that will be powered by it. The company also shared some specifications, along with the fact that there will be different configurations. Now, we may have information about a second configuration through the first official native GeForce graphics driver.

First spotted by Windows Latest, the driver version 616.00 for Microsoft’s RTX Spark Dev Box includes a ‘nv_surface_woa.inf’ file that has strings for two graphics configurations. One of them, the one known from Nvidia’s announcement, is a Blackwell GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, while the other is a slightly lower-end 5,120 CUDA core configuration.

There is no information on what else will be different with this 5,120 CUDA core configuration. The CPU core count and AI performance for this configuration are unclear, but we know that the RTX Spark chip comes with up to a 20-core Grace CPU, up to 1 Petaflop of AI performance, and up to 128 GB of unified memory. It could be that the CUDA code count is the only difference between these two configurations, which would be similar to what Apple does with its 'M' lineup of processors. 

Besides the second CUDA config, the driver package mentions “NVIDIA Desktop Device” and “Nvidia NPU.” The former could be associated with the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, but that’s about all the information that can be gleaned from the driver.

Recently, the RTX Spark Arm chip surfaced on Cinebench inside a Surface Laptop Ultra test system with a 20-core CPU. It was competitive with AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395 and Intel’s Core Ultra X9 388H, but trailed behind Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite and Apple M5 Max in both single- and multi-core performance.