Apple's lead in laptop chips is safe for now. Nvidia's RTX Spark, its first laptop system-on-a-chip with CPU and GPU sharing up to 128GB of unified memory, goes after memory instead, and in Max Tech's ASUS-sponsored review of the ProArt P16 that carries it, the M5 Max stays ahead in almost every test.
In the channel's runs the RTX Spark lands between Apple's two pro chips. Geekbench 7 graphics scored about 50% above the M5 Pro, 3DMark Steel Nomad Light put it behind only the M5 Max, and a 10-minute Cinebench 2026 run left it just short of the M5 Pro, with single-core held back by Arm cores from 2024.
Local AI is the exception. On a 122-billion-parameter Qwen 3.5 model the RTX Spark generated about 32 tokens per second, while the 48GB M5 Max couldn't fit the model in memory and slowed to a crawl. The ProArt also weighs 3.9 pounds against 4.7 for a 16-inch MacBook Pro, a gap the video calls obvious in a backpack.
The fair fight is a MacBook Pro configured with the same 128GB, which the channel says was faster across its tests. The RTX Spark makes sense when the work needs CUDA or a 100B-plus model away from a desk, and it runs Windows on Arm, so the app check comes before the spec sheet.
