Samsung to reportedly make a PC processor as early as next year
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If 2026 has been a poor year in regard to hardware pricing, it's at least been a good one in terms of companies and architectures spreading their roots into unfamiliar territories. Primarily, I'm thinking about Nvidia RTX Spark, the company's first proper desktop/mobile processor announced just last month . And now, it seems Samsung has taken note, as it will reportedly be making its own Arm-based chip for desktop/mobile, or 'AI PCs' as they now unfortunately seem to be called.
Apparently it will be called Gaia—a strange name, perhaps, given the planet-eating energy consumption of AI datacentres . But enough cynicism, the double plus-side here is that not only will we be getting a new processor, but also hopefully some decent competition against Nvidia's RTX Spark alongside Qualcomm's Arm-based chips.
According to Seoul Economic Daily , "industry sources" have it that Samsung Gaia will be based on a 4 nm process and is targeting production as early as next year. Apparently, the company is already talking to PC manufacturers regarding the supply of the chip.
4 nm production is what AMD and Nvidia currently build on, but that's over on TSMC's side of the pitch. Samsung's own 4 nm tech hasn't been as widely adopted, but that's been changing over the last year , and now it seems Samsung deems it ripe for producing PCs.
Samsung certainly has experience making system-on-chips (SoCs), given its Exynos mobile processors, but we'll have to wait and see whether that experience will translate over to PC. Here's hoping.
An Nvidia RTX Spark in-hand on the left, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on the right. | Credit: Future (left), AP - Associated Press (right)
None of this would be on the cards, of course, if Windows on Arm—the operating system's for-Arm fork, which largely relies on emulation via Prism —wasn't doing so well. But it's certainly doing well enough to support running Alan Wake 2 pretty well on RTX Spark, albeit natively and not via emulation, which won't be representative of the plenty of apps that must still be emulated.
At any rate, it will very much be a game of "wait and see", but even if the only effect is to push RTX Spark and Snapdragon X Elite/X2 Elite machines a little lower in price, positive changes could be afoot
