It's been more than a year since Nvidia's N1/N1X first leaked, yet the rumored chips were still a no-show at CES this year, as expected. Beyond a few rumors, the tight-lipped news cycle surrounding these chips points toward scaled-back ambitions. The latest leak, in particular, might paint a grimmer picture than a hopeful one: a new shipping manifest showing a Dell laptop that's since been entirely rebranded, perhaps hinting at the fate of the chip it was seen with, as well.
The device we're talking about is the Dell 16 Premium, which the brand thankfully renamed back to Dell XPS at CES 2026. It was spotted with an "N1X ES2" in a shipping manifest, meaning that Dell may have been experimenting with engineering samples of the N1X as late as November 20, 2025. Whether those were considerations for final units, or even just a classic CES concept appearance, we don't know.
The fact that the laptop is still mentioned as a Dell 16 Premium this late in its development cycle, instead of an XPS, could indicate a last-minute change. Pessimistically thinking, maybe at one point the N1X was supposed to make it through to retail, but the rebrand killed those aspirations entirely. If this leak is to be believed, both Nvidia and Dell's internal leadership could be responsible for that decision. Right now, though, all we have is speculation.
For those out of the loop, for years we've heard about the N1 silicon: purported to be an RTX 5070-class GPU featuring 6,144 CUDA cores, combined with 20 ARM cores built on the Grace architecture. Co-developed with MediaTek, the N1 is actually what powers the GB10 Superchip inside the DGX Spark, as confirmed by Jensen Huang himself. So, the hardware definitely does exist, but it's only served as a blueprint for Nvidia's AI efforts instead of getting a mainstream desktop (N1) or mobile (N1X) release.
If launched, the N1 lineup would mark Nvidia's grand return to the conventional CPU segment in more than a decade, since the Tegra X1 last powered the Nintendo Switch. To be clear, the company never stopped making ARM-based CPU but they've been limited to enterprise-grade solutions, not something consumer-facing like, say, a Ryzen APU.
That's the market the N1 was purportedly targeting, which is what made the chips so exciting. Conversely, Windows-on-ARM isn't the most exciting thing ever, and the N1's graphical prowess might've even been lost on it, but it would've certainly progressed the platform. Rivals like Qualcomm are already working to make ARM-based systems run Windows without a hiccup.
There's also a small, conflict-of-interest-sized elephant in the room, which is Nvidia's equity investment in Intel. The two are in partnership to co-develop Intel x86 RTX SoCs, likely using high-bandwidth interconnects to put RTX chiplets next to Intel CPUs. So far, reports have said these efforts coincide with each other, but if an existing product never transitions from blueprint to retail, it wouldn't be difficult to guess why.
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