Nvidia's long-awaited N1X Arm chip for consumer PCs spotted in a near retail-ready Dell laptop

Nvidia's N1X Arm-based CPU has been a long time coming. But now it's been spotted in a shipping manifest configured in a 16-inch Dell laptop. So, is it just about to launch? Possibly not.

Twitter user @Olrak29_ spotted a reference to a "Dell 16 Premium" with "N1X" in a shipping manifest listing on the NBD Trade Data website. N1X almost certainly refers to Nvidia's Arm chip for consumer PCs, the existence of which has been confirmed by no lesser an authority than CEO and leather jacket impresario Jensen Huang.

Further intriguing information in the listing includes the phrase "engineering technical samples for R&D purposes" and the entry "DVT". The latter refers to Design Validation Test, which generally means a feature and function complete version of a product.

Indeed, we've had "DVT" versions of laptops as official review samples from some brands. They often only need a firmware update to be identical to retail shipping products.

That obviously implies that the Dell laptop with the Nvidia chip was nearly ready to ship. But there are a few catches. First, this manifest listing is actually from November 20 last year. And yet nothing has been launched.

Moreover, the laptop listed has Dell's 2025 "Premium" branding. And Dell has just announced at CES that it is returning to its XPS brand for 2026 laptops with small "p" premium market positioning.

There's a strong implication, then, that Dell had this laptop inked in for a 2025 launch, but something has caused it to be delayed or even cancelled. We previously reported in July that the N1X had indeed been delayed due to multiple factors.

One was the need to revise the chip itself. But "delays in Microsoft's operating system roadmap" were also sited.

That latter issue, specifically operating system and software support, is surely the biggest challenge facing any Arm chip for the PC. For now, it's not clear exactly what specifications N1X will have. If it's based on the same GB10 "superchip" used in the Nvidia DGX Spark box, then it could have an iGPU with the same specs as an RTX 5070 desktop GPU.

But whatever the exact spec, expectations will be high when it comes to gaming performance and that will demand excellent OS support including some kind of translation layer.

Such a thing currently exists, of course, in the form of Windows on Arm and the Prism translation layer. The problem is that has been specifically tuned for Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips. So, a version built specifically for Nvidia's N1X would be required. And maybe that has been delayed.

Anyway, all we know absolutely for sure is that Nvidia has confirmed that an Arm chip for the PC is coming, but that it has yet to appear. So, an Nvidia Arm chip for the PC remains an exciting but thus far elusive prospect.