By Adam Conway
Publication Date: 2026-06-06 23:01:00
Following Nvidia’s reveal of its RTX Spark laptops, I attended an AMD and HP roundtable at Computex. A fellow reporter asked Rahul Tikoo of AMD and Jim Nottingham of HP, two Vice Presidents at their respective companies, whether they welcomed the new competitor. After all, both companies have been pitching small machines that run big AI models locally for quite a while now. And Nvidia had just tossed its own hat into the ring.
In response, Tikoo stood and gestured toward the HP-made and AMD-powered products scattered across the desk in front of us. He picked up the HP Strix Halo mini PC on the table, held it out for the room to see, and turned to Nottingham to ask a simple question: “Jim, when did you launch this system?”
Nottingham’s reply was short, though accompanied by a slight grin — “CES 2025.” Tikoo, still standing, slowly repeated Nottingham’s answer, before looking around and grabbing another HP-made laptop from the table. Turning back to Nottingham, Tikoo was now mirroring his grin: “And this product, Jim — when did you launch it?”
At this stage it was fairly clear what Tikoo’s point was going to be.
“Two months later. February or March 2025,” came the reply.
Tikoo, handing the laptop over to us at the table before returning to his seat, circled back to the original question, answering it with a smile. “We have 35 products with Strix Halo in market,” he said. “Welcome, Nvidia, to the modern compute journey.”
AMD, clearly, has confidence,…
