The Morning After: NVIDIA thinks its new chip will revolutionize PCs

Plus, NASA ends a Mars mission and Meta’s still being creepy.

It's been a busy week, with Computex and Microsoft Build just two of the raft of big events going on right now. The biggest news story from both was probably NVIDIA's glossy announcement of its RTX Spark system on a chip... sorry, I mean "superchip." It's an integrated CPU/GPU/RAM unit, like AMD's Ryzen AI Max, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite and Apple Silicon. NVIDIA says it will offer unprecedented levels of AI computing power in a low-power mobile device.

RTX Spark is the portable sibling of NVIDIA's existing DGX Spark AI mini-desktop, but tailored for Windows notebooks and desktops. It combines a MediaTek-made ARM CPU with 20 cores with an NVIDIA integrated GPU with power similar to that of the RTX 5070. Users can order the system with between 16GB and 128GB of unified memory, and there's plenty of bandwidth to join the whole chorus together.

NVIDIA says plenty of PC makers are clamoring to get the RTX Spark into their gear, with Microsoft at the head of the line. It announced the Surface Laptop Ultra, a 15-inch notebook which Engadget's Devindra Hardawar described as a "MacBook Pro clone." I'm sure he'll get the Ultra in for testing at some point soon, when we'll be able to discern if it's worth any of the hype it's been getting.

NASA has pulled the plug on the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission after it lost contact with the probe. MAVEN launched in 2013 and was originally intended to scan the Martian atmosphere for a single year, but wound up operating for more than a decade. It even did its part to help the Perseverance rover start its mission back in 2020. Alas, NASA lost contact with MAVEN at the start of December, and after six months of silence has decided to wish it well in its future endeavors.

Integrated batteries are great, right up to the point where they go wrong and your device needs a costly repair, or an even costlier replacement. It's why the EU has been laying the groundwork to mandate hardware makers build gear with user-replaceable batteries to cut down on waste. Nintendo has announced that it will be complying with the rules, and will launch a version of the Switch 2 in the territory with a swappable cell. Unfortunately, it didn't go into specifics about how that would work, or when those units would hit the market, but we suspect they will sell well.

Code purporting to run a facial recognition feature, dubbed Name Tag, has been found lying dormant on Meta's AI app. The system is reportedly able to capture faces and notify the wearer of their