AMD Challenges RTX Spark: Strix Halo and Gorgon Halo Ready to Face NVIDIA

The announcement of the RTX Spark platform by NVIDIA during Computex 2026 immediately sparked a comparison with other market players. Intel expressed a strong sense of respect and a "healthy dose of paranoia" regarding the arrival of the new competitor, but what do they think over at AMD?

In an interview with Tom's Hardware USA, the company representatives at Computex were a bit more straightforward in evaluating NVIDIA's proposal. AMD believes it already has competitive solutions and welcomes the arrival of a new player.

"I am really excited that NVIDIA has entered the game. You know, we have been the only ones in the market for almost two years now, and large local memory is becoming critical for agent AI workloads," said Rahul Tikoo, senior vice president and general manager of AMD's Client Division. "I’m actually glad to see NVIDIA join the race for these fantastic products."

AMD believes that Strix Halo and, in the future, Gorgon Halo are well-positioned against NVIDIA's RTX Spark products. Andrej Zdravkovic, chief software officer at AMD, stated: "At this point... I mean, you make a mistake if you don’t buy a Strix Halo notebook," referring to the choice of device for developers.

"I’m actually curious to know what [NVIDIA] has done, but when I look at their specifications, I see they have 128 GB of local memory. We have done that on Strix Halo. Their specs provide for a 20-core CPU. We have a 16-core/32-thread CPU here," Tikoo said. "So, if you just compare the specifications, I don't see... Gorgon Halo, which will come out in the third quarter, will be a better product," Tikoo added.

Gorgon Halo, expected in the third quarter of the year, is set to bring unified memory up to 192 GB while maintaining Zen 5 architecture for the CPU and RDNA 3.5 for the graphics component.

However, the competition will not be limited to hardware. One of the key themes remains the dominance of NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem, regarded for years as one of the main competitive advantages for the company in the AI sector. Andrej Zdravkovic believes that the weight of this element is now lower than in the past.

According to the executive, the ROCm environment has reached a level of maturity that makes it relatively easy for many developers to transition from one platform to another, except in cases where highly specific instructions or features of a particular ecosystem are used.

AMD also sees indirect benefits from NVIDIA's entry into the consumer AI PC market. The simultaneous presence of the two main players in the sector could indeed accelerate the development of the entire ecosystem, promoting both the spread of software optimized for local execution of AI models and increased attention from developers towards the Windows platform.