Shortly after Nvidia announced its first CPU for a very special supercomputer, the noise coming out of GTC 2021 suggested that Nvidia's green team was working with MediaTek on ARM gaming laptop specs. Yes, a GeForce-powered gaming laptop platform that uses neither Intel x86 nor AMD x86 processors... It is truly a brave new world.

Nvidia's acquisition of Arm is not yet complete, but this could be evidence that Nvidia is looking to become more involved in the ARM ecosystem from both the server and gaming sides. Its ARM-based Grace processors will make Intel and AMD uncomfortable in terms of x86 data center dominance, but no one would have expected ARM to start influencing gaming laptops.

It is worth prefacing this by saying that MediaTek and Nvidia may do some preliminary work on the specifications of a reference notebook for development, and there is no assurance that they will produce a real gaming notebook that will be released. Still, the fact that Nvidia is working with one of the world's biggest players in ARM silicon lends a little credence to such a device seeing the light of day. [MediaTek CEO Rick Tsai said in a statement to Engadget, "MediaTek is the world's largest supplier of ARM chips used in everything from smartphones to Chromebooks to smart TVs. "We look forward to leveraging our technology and working with NVIDIA to bring the power of GPUs to the ARM PC platform for gaming, content creation and many other applications, and GPU acceleration will be a huge boost for the entire ARM ecosystem."

ARM's x86 emulation is proving to be a viable alternative to native silicon, especially with the new M1 chip in Apple's new MacBook. So an exciting future could be in the offing, where GeForce-powered gaming laptops running on ARM CPUs could actually run the Steam library.

Nvidia has long referred to the gaming laptop market as a platform unto itself and talked about it like a new console generation, but as ARM CPUs and GeForce GPUs go hand in hand, Nvidia-branded only GeForce ShieldBooks could easily see their way to store shelves. And that's kind of exciting.

We have reached out to Nvidia for comment.