Nvidia's Chinese competitor Moore Threads beats it to launching a laptop featuring custom 12-core Arm chip — "MTT AI Book" can run Windows, seems to have adopted Arm before Nvidia's N1X

We've been waiting on Nvidia's long-rumored N1X Arm chips for a while at this point. Through several leaks and official teases, the company's ARM-based consumer SoC has excited many as it's poised to open the gates of high-end Arm performance on Windows machines. Interestingly, it seems like the "Chinese Nvidia" has beaten the Green Team to the punch with its own custom Arm chip in a new laptop.

Moore Threads, the region's local darling, has just launched the "MTT AI Book" — a new thin-and-light laptop powered by an in-house "MT1000" CPU. What's special about this chip is that it's Arm-based and features 12 CPU cores clocked at 2.65 GHz (base), along with an unknown GPU that's based on its MUSA microarchitecture. The NPU is capable of delivering up to 50 TOPS of AI compute, similar to AMD's Strix Point.

The SoC as a whole is called "Yangtze" (translated) and is paired with 32 GB of LPDDR5X-7500 unified memory, meaning that's shared between the MT1000 CPU and the MUSA-based GPU. The 1 TB SSD onboard carries a Linux-based operating system called "AIOS," but the device can also run Windows. That's what makes this exciting, because now we're in N1 territory. Unfortunately, we're not looking at Windows-on-Arm here, but rather a virtualization-based approach where Windows just sits inside a VM.

The Nvidia N1 silicon is said to have a 20-core ARM CPU and an RTX 5070-level GPU because Jensen Huang himself confirmed it powers the GB10 Superchip inside the DGX Spark.

Even if we imagine for a second that Moore Thread's Arm SoC is natively running Windows and is optimized — it just doesn't stack up to what Nvidia is cooking. The Green Team's offering is supposed to open up AI and gaming in a whole new way for Windows-on-Arm. Meanwhile, Qualcomm is already trying with its own X series of SoCs.

AMD and Intel, on the other hand, don't have competing Arm products so we can't really speculate much. The Red Team's Strix Halo chips, which feature desktop-level integrated graphics, and the rumored Nova Lake-AX (cancelled?) Lineups are both technically in the spot that N1X might gun for: a powerful, portable machine with strong battery life.

Moore Thread's Yangtze doesn't seem to be there yet, and that's proven by its Geekbench listing: it scores 1,127 points in the single-core test and 7,420 points in multi-core. Those numbers are very underwhelming. The most modern CPU we could find around these results was the Ryzen 3 7320U at 1,112 single-threaded points; even a recent Core i3/Core Ultra 3 SKU scores more than that.

Apart from its intriguing silicon, the MTT AI Book features a 2.8K 14-inch OLED display running at 120 Hz. The port selection seems to be limited to just 3x USB-C ports, and the battery is rated at 70Wh. The laptop weighs 1.5 kg despite being CNC-milled out of a "6-series" aluminum alloy. It also looks very similar to a MacBook Air and is priced at 9,999 CNY on JD.com, or about $1,447 USD.

We hope to see more mainstream media coverage of this device with independent reviews that test the Arm-based SoC's capability. This was just one Geekbench listing, so there's still a chance that with the right drivers and firmware tuning, the MTT AI Book can deliver better performance. It's aimed at AI applications, though, so we may not be that impressed by its graphical prowess when it surfaces.

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