AMD executives react to Nvidia’s RTX Spark — ‘you’re just wrong if you don’t get a Strix Halo notebook’

Regardless of your opinion of Nvidia’s RTX Spark, there’s no doubt that it’s the most consequential consumer announcement to come out of Computex 2026. Unlike Intel, which told Tom’s Hardware it’s handling the launch with “a healthy dose of paranoia,” AMD’s executives are confident that its Strix Halo and upcoming Gorgon Halo products will compete well with the N1X and N1 under the RTX Spark brand.

“I’m really excited that Nvidia has joined the game. You know, we were the only game in town for almost two years now, and the large local memory is becoming super critical in the agentic AI [workloads],” said AMD’s Rahul Tikoo, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s client business. “I'm actually happy to see Nvidia join the race for these great products.”

AMD, of course, believes that Strix Halo and eventually Gorgon Halo are positioned well against RTX Spark devices. In a separate discussion, AMD’s Andrej Zdravkovic, chief software officer, said, “At this point in time… I mean, you’re just wrong if you don’t get a Strix Halo notebook,” when speaking on the choice of machine for developers. As the software lead at AMD, however, Zdravkovic is distanced from the hardware. Tikoo had more direct comments on the hardware comparison.

“I’m actually curious about what [Nvidia has] done, but when I look at their specs, their specs are 128 gigs of local memory. We’ve done it on Strix Halo. Their specs are a 20-core CPU. We have a 16-core / 32-thread CPU in here,” Tikoo said. “So, if you just compare the specs, I don’t see… now, Gorgon Halo, which is coming out in Q3, is going to be a better product.”

Hardware is only one part of the battle, which has become clear as AMD continues to push its way into AI infrastructure. Tom’s Hardware asked Zdravkovic about the so-called ‘CUDA moat’ that Nvidia has built for itself, and how AMD plans to address that as it rolls out updates for its own ROCm stack.

“If you asked me the same question like three years ago, I would be, yeah, that really matters. I think that matters less at this point,” Zdravkovic told Tom’s Hardware. “Nvidia has created a phenomenal ecosystem around CUDA, and our advantage is that ROCm is, from a developer point of view, extremely easy to use… the shift from one to another is easy, and the only challenge is if your application ends up using some of the specific commands that Nvidia has and we don’t, and the other way around.”

The posturing against Nvidia is expected, both on the hardware and software side, but Tikoo also pointed out that Nvidia’s entrance into the consumer PC market has downstream benefits for AMD.

“Nvidia has brought validity into the space… I think it’s also going to help the ecosystem move forward faster, right, because Nvidia and [AMD] are the two big players in this space, and both of us now being in this space not only drives the cloud ecosystem, it drives the AI ecosystem in the PC on Windows, and so we’re excited about that,” Tikoo said.

We’re still a few months away before we can see what material impact RTX Spark has on the broader industry, though we expect the initial rollout to be more muted than Nvidia’s keynote suggests. Although Nvidia plans to sell configurations of RTX Spark down as low as 16 GB of memory, the initial configuration will top out at 128 GB and likely demand several thousand dollars. At least initially, it’s a product that looks like it will appeal to a relatively small (but growing) market of AI developers, not dissimilar to Strix Halo.

AMD’s upcoming Gorgon Halo chips are largely a refresh of Strix Halo, leveraging the same Zen 5 cores for the CPU and RDNA 3.5 cores for the GPU, though with a bump up to 192 GB of unified memory. At least from the memory perspective, which continues to be an important specification for AI workloads, AMD has the edge. But, as we’re all well aware, there’s far more that goes into a platform (especially a consumer platform that costs several thousand dollars) than memory alone.

It will be interesting to see how the dynamic between Nvidia and AMD plays out, as we expect Gorgon Halo and RTX Spark to arrive in the same window; AMD says Q3 for Gorgon Halo, while Nvidia has simply said “fall” for RTX Spark.

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