Nvidia’s N1x chip trails Apple M3 Max in early benchmark test

Nvidia’s first serious Windows-PC chip test is less a verdict than a snapshot. A June 2025 Geekbench 6 entry for an NVIDIA N1x system showed 3,096 in single-core performance and 18,837 in multi-core, a result that puts the company’s upcoming processor in the conversation with Apple’s M3 Max while still leaving plenty unresolved about what shipping machines will actually deliver.

The benchmark mattered because Nvidia is expected next week to unveil the first Windows computers using its own chips as the main processor. Microsoft Surface devices and PCs from other manufacturers are expected to be among the first to carry them, and Nvidia, Microsoft and Arm have all been teasing the announcement ahead of Computex in Taipei. Their social posts used the phrase “A new era of PC” and included coordinates that point to the city hosting the trade show.

The timing gives the leak immediate weight. Nvidia’s Computex keynote is scheduled for June 1, and GTC Taipei 2026 runs June 1-4 at the Taipei International Convention Center. If the company is about to make a platform push into mainstream Windows laptops, then the N1x benchmark is a preview of the debate to come: not whether the chip can post a respectable score, but whether Nvidia can turn its AI and graphics muscle into a viable everyday PC ecosystem.

The Geekbench entry identified the test machine as an HP system running Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS with 128 GB of RAM. Heise online said the run recognized 20 CPU cores and a maximum clock of a little more than 4 GHz, while the browser listing showed a memory size of 119.59 GB. Wccftech says the N1x is believed to be a modified version of Nvidia’s GB10 SoC, with a 20-core ARM CPU designed by MediaTek, an RTX 5070-class GPU and LPDDR5X unified memory shared between CPU and GPU.

That is why the score should be read carefully. Geekbench can show how a chip behaves in a standardized test, but it does not prove battery life, sustained performance under load, driver maturity, thermal limits or how well Nvidia’s software stack will handle a real Windows workload. Wccftech noted the numbers were gathered in June 2025 and likely reflect unoptimized pre-release hardware, which means production laptops could land higher. The comparison to Apple’s M3 Max is also imperfect, since Apple announced the M3 family on October 30, 2023 and began shipping MacBook Pro models with those chips on November 7, 2023. In other words, Nvidia is not just chasing an old benchmark target. It is trying to prove that its real business is not winning a consumer-chip beauty contest, but extending its AI-centered ecosystem into the PC itself.