20-core ARM chip for NVIDIA’s desktop AI supercomputer could comes to mainstream PCs eventually

This week NVIDIA introduced Project DIGITSa computer small enough to be held in one hand, but powerful enough that the company calls it “the world’s smallest artificial intelligence supercomputer.” NVIDIA claims that the computer, equipped with the NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell “superchip,” delivers up to petaflop AI performance without relying on cloud servers.

With a price tag of $3,000 and a target audience of developers, the DIGITS computer is not really intended for mass use. But NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang says the computer’s ARM-based processor could will eventually appear on more mainstream PCs.

The DIGITS PC gets its AI capabilities from the NVIDIA Blackwell GPU, but is also powered by an NVIDIA Grace processor developed in collaboration with MediaTek. This chip is a 20-core processor based on ARM architecture.

According to ReutersNVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said during a recent investor presentation that NVIDIA or MediaTek could bring the processor to market as a chip that could be used in other computers. And although he did not confirm that this will If that happens, he says NVIDIA “has plans” for a desktop processor… although his statements are pretty vague at the moment.

As for the Project DIGITS PC, it is not expected to ship until May 2025. So it will probably be a while before we see any another computers with a processor.

But a computer with a 20-core ARM processor, a less powerful GPU, and less than 128GB of unified memory will likely cost much less than $3,000. And while the DIGITS PC comes with a Linux-based operating system called NVIDIA DGX OS, there are rumors that we might see Windows on ARM PCs with non-Qualcomm chips next year. So it’s interesting to see MediaTek enter the high-end processor market.