Sascha Krohn smiles when I press him on what must be the headache of building laptops with four CPU manufacturers at once. “Technically, we are already in five“, he corrects me. “For our commercial team we also have MediaTek chips.”
That one correction, left almost as an aside in a 30-minute conversation at Computex 2026, captures something that most laptop buyers (and most ASUS competitors) haven’t fully taken into account. ASUS now sells Windows machines on Intel, AMD, Qualcomm Snapdragon X, Nvidia’s new RTX Spark, and MediaTek. Five CPU platforms in a single OEM line. No other major laptop manufacturer is even close.
Krohn, ASUS’ global director of technical marketing for the PC and laptop business, is tasked with explaining why that’s not a strategy in search of a story.
“It would be a lot easier and less work if there was just a monopoly,” he tells me. “A single chip supplier, and that’s all you can do. It would be very easy to create a line of laptops. You know exactly which chip goes in which device, and that’s it.”
I point out that the approach has worked quite well for one of its biggest competitors.
“Yes,” he says, “but at the same time, ASUS has always been very passionate. We have passionate engineers and product managers. They wouldn’t be happy with that. They would be frustrated.”
The ProArt is armed
The clearest expression of that philosophy at Computex 2026 is the new ProArt P14 and P16, both built on Nvidia’s RTX Spark platform, the GB10 Grace Blackwell architecture that Nvidia announced at the show. RTX Spark combines a 20-core Arm-based Grace CPU with a Blackwell RTX GPU carrying 6,144 CUDA cores, up to 128GB of unified memory, and approximately one petaFLOP of AI compute. Nvidia is positioning it as a creator-class platform; ASUS is the first major OEM to ship a flagship laptop for creators.
Krohn’s personal choice is the 14-inch.
“It’s much thinner, much lighter,” he says. “What’s really impressive is that our engineers managed to fit the same I/O ports and almost the same size battery into that small 14-inch chassis. It’s almost the same thickness as the 16-inch. The performance per volume is through the roof.”
He asked me what memory configuration I preferred, to which I suggested that 128GB for that type of machine is exactly right. That preference, he tells me, is not idiosyncratic. “Most of the media and YouTubers I talk to feel the same way. But there are some who think a 16 or 32GB version would also be popular, and they tend to be more on the consumer and gaming side, and less on the creator side.”
That answer reveals something about how ASUS is positioning the P14 and P16 internally. The initial memory configuration that matters to the business is not the lowest. It’s what distinguishes a creative workstation from a thin and light one. If you buy a ProArt on RTX Spark, ASUS expects you to order at least 64GB.
The more difficult question, and the one Krohn was careful with, is what happens to the current ProArt P16 x86. “We’re going to continue selling it,” he says. “Where this takes us in the future, we will have to wait and see. In the end, ASUS’ philosophy is always: follow what customers want.”
This is the closest a major OEM has come this year to publicly covering the long-term future of x86 creator laptops.
Five chips, one philosophy
It is also where the five platforms thesis is put to the test. ASUS is now in a position where it is simultaneously selling a creator laptop with Intel x86 and a creator laptop with Nvidia Arm, and asking customers to choose. The Vivobook and Zenbook lines run on three different CPU architectures depending on the configuration. ROG gaming laptops are based on Intel and AMD. ExpertBook commercial devices include MediaTek options.
Five platforms means five sets of driver stacks, five firmware update channels, five sets of partner relationships, and five different roadmaps for engineers to follow.
Krohn doesn’t pretend it’s easy.
“Is it more difficult? I think absolutely yes,” he says. “But at the same time, ASUS has always been very passionate about technology. Our engineers and product managers are really passionate about technology. It’s extra work for them, but they’re happy. And I can relate, because it’s the same for me. It’s extra work to figure out all these different platforms and talking points, keep track of features and specifications. But at the same time, I’m very excited about it. It’s more work, but it’s also more rewarding.”
Frames the cross-platform approach as a benefit to customers in a fragmented silicon landscape. “From an end-user perspective, it’s an absolute win. You want competition. Competition means more innovation. It means you’ll be able to have more different devices, and there may be a device that’s right for you. Everyone has different requirements. All these different platforms have different pros and cons. So it’s really good for customers to be able to choose; this is the one for me.”
That is, in effect, ASUS’s elevator pitch for 2026 and beyond: not “buy our chip,” but “buy us the chip that’s right for you.”
The moment of the arm
The interview comes to Computex the same week that Nvidia formally entered the Windows laptop CPU market, a market that Qualcomm has spent three years trying to enter with Snapdragon
“We have a lot of new devices based on Snapdragon X,” he notes. “It’s a win-win for all customers who already bought a Zenbook A14 or 16. And it also makes the new Snapdragon
The implication, which Krohn doesn’t need to explain, is that the Arm developer math just changed. When a chipmaker champions Windows on Arm, app developers may ignore it. The calculus changes when Nvidia comes into play. Whether that is the turning point or another false dawn is a debate that will rage on for the next 18 months. Krohn is not going to predict it. But he is clearly betting on it.
20 years of ROG and the handheld that surprised it
The other major Computex moment for ASUS this year is ROG’s 20th anniversary, marked on the show floor with the Edition 20 line: a Crosshair The 3000-watt power supply, in particular, is the kind of statement that makes Computex Computex.
But when I ask Krohn which product from ROG’s 20 years has surprised him the most, he chooses something smaller.
“The ROG Xbox Ally X,” he says. “When it came out, it was priced relatively high. Now everyone is very excited about the current price. And it still surprises me that we managed to keep the price stable, while everything else has gone up and up.”
The Ally “It kept selling out as we had more inventory. Even now, the ROG Xbox Ally
In a year defined by memory supply pressure pushing prices up across the PC industry, maintaining the price of a handheld throughout the entire product cycle counts as an achievement. It also tells you which is the most in-demand overheating product from ASUS right now.
cosmic particles
The conversation ends with durability. Krohn could have given me standard information on military-grade testing standards, and to be fair, ASUS runs them in their own internal quality lab before sending them off for third-party validation. Instead, look for an example that captures how deep the engineering culture is.
“In the new ExpertBook B5 Flip G2, we put a metal shield over each memory chip,” he says. “Because there can be interference in the memory chips that affects Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, even slightly. It also helps cool the memory. And it helps against extremely rare cosmic particles hitting the memory chip. It can happen. It happens.”
It is, as he says, “maybe one of the examples where we are going a little overboard.” But you can hear the marketing engineer when he says it.
What ASUS is really betting on
Five CPU platforms. Two ProArt creator laptops in two different architectures. A handheld that will not stop selling. Protection of memory against cosmic particles. The emerging image of ASUS in 2026 is of a company that has consciously chosen complexity over efficiency and is challenging the rest of the laptop industry to keep pace.
The real question is whether the market will reward that approach over the next 24 months. ASUS’s bet is that at a time when silicon is fragmenting (between x86 and Arm, between Intel and AMD, between Qualcomm and Nvidia), the buyer who wants a laptop that fits their specific workflow will still find the right one on the ASUS shelf.
“It would be a lot easier and less work if there was just a monopoly,” he reminds me at the end. “But we have passionate engineers.”
You can hear the smile.
