NVIDIA RTX Spark leaks with weak Cinebench 2026 multi-core performance

NVIDIA's first laptop chip, RTX Spark, has surfaced in a Cinebench 2026 leak after being tested in a Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra with the High Performance profile enabled. The report says the unreleased device still delivered a multi-core result well below expectations.

The leak puts RTX Spark at 540 points in single-core testing and 5,771 points in multi-core testing. That makes the single-core score roughly in line with the Apple M3 Max, while the Apple M4 Max is said to be 35.6% faster in multi-threaded workloads.

That result may not tell the whole story. The Surface Laptop Ultra is designed to run the chipset between 80W and 95W, but High Performance mode is not enabled by default. According to TechPowerUp forum user Fouquin, a hidden configuration was enabled, letting RTX Spark boost to 50W while the Cortex cores ran at 2.80GHz.

Even so, the report notes that Cortex-X925 cores can reach 4.00GHz under the right cooling conditions, which suggests the sample may have been held back by the laptop rather than the chip alone. Fouquin's numbers point to either software limits from Microsoft or a cooling setup that could not properly handle the 50W load.

RTX Spark itself is built around a 20-core Grace CPU with 10 Cortex-X925 cores and 10 Cortex-A725 cores. The platform also includes a Blackwell RTX GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, up to 128GB of LPDDR5X unified memory, and around 600 GB/s of NVLink-C2C bandwidth, so the leak only captures one side of the hardware's picture.

The same report says the platform is also tied to gaming and AI workloads, including AAA games with path tracing such as PRAGMATA and Alan Wake 2, plus large language models with 120 billion parameters. For now, though, the headline is simple: this first Cinebench 2026 look makes RTX Spark's multi-core performance look weaker than many would have hoped.

Does this look like a bad sample, or a warning sign for NVIDIA's 20-core laptop chip?