NVIDIA Is Building A Gaming Laptop APU That Could Shake The Industry
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NVIDIA is rumored to be working on a laptop APU that could have a pretty significant impact on the future of laptop graphics cards. An APU, or Accelerated Processing Unit, is a processor that essentially combines both the CPU and GPU, in a sense. In other words, it’s a processor that has integrated graphics. Companies like Valve, ASUS, and Lenovo are using APUs inside their gaming handhelds. These are all created by AMD, though.
Now, NVIDIA seems to be getting into the APU market, but for laptops instead of handhelds. The company has reportedly been working on this chip for a little while and already has an engineering sample built. It’s also reportedly targeting a range of 80W to 120W.
The NVIDIA laptop APU is labeled as being made for “gaming laptops”
There isn’t a whole lot of information available yet about this APU. However, there are a few details that were discovered. As reported by Moore’s Law is Dead on YouTube (via Notebookcheck and Laptopmag), NVIDIA’s APU is combining an ARM CPU and an NVIDIA GPU into a single die, with 8 memory modules surrounding the outer edges on both the left and right sides.
There are also rumors that the ARM CPU may have been developed by MediaTek. This could bring an interesting dynamic to the machines that will house these APUs, as MediaTek isn’t really known for making hardware that powers gaming laptops. That being said, if it did make the CPU, it’s likely working very closely with NVIDIA to the point where this APU provides a very custom experience in terms of performance. Similar to how Sony worked with AMD for the chipsets in the PS5 and PS5 Pro.
NVIDIA is rumored to be looking at a launch as early as Q4 2025
If the rumor from he report is true, then NVIDIA could be looking to launch this APU sometime in Q4 2025 at the earliest. The same rumor suggests it could also come sometime around Q1 2026. It’s worth noting that this doesn’t mean we’ll see gaming laptops using this APU on the market by that time.
What’s more likely is that NVIDIA could announce the APU around then. Meanwhile, devices powered by the APU could launch a few months later. This is what happened with NVIDIA’s RTX 50-series laptop GPUs. They were announced in January during CES 2025, and then the first laptops with these GPUs weren’t made available until a few months down the road. The Razer Blade 18, for example, was just recently launched.
