Rumor has it that Nvidia is eying to operate sales for the RTX 4050 mobile in tandem with the upcoming RTX 5050 - hinting towards a potential price bump for budget Blackwell mobile GPUs per Lenovo's Product Manager at Weibo (via WCCFTech). The leak also explicitly states that all other RTX 40 mobile (Ada Lovelace) offerings will be discontinued - and replaced by respective RTX 50 (Blackwell) counterparts.
The flagship RTX 50 GPUs will be unveiled at CES 2025, but mobile variants, as is tradition, might launch by Computex 2025 or later. Even so, be prepared to pay a pretty penny, as Lenovo's Product Manager at Weibo asserts that the RTX 4050 laptop/mobile will coexist with the RTX 5050 once it launches.
Per the source, laptops with the newer variant might be priced higher as Nvidia looks to reposition Blackwell in its product stack. Since the Lenovo representative cannot access internal pricing numbers, this may be a hypothetical assumption. Alternatively, RTX 4050-equipped laptops could go down in price, but that's mere conjecture.
This is not the first time we've heard such rumors. A prior report from Clevo suggested that Nvidia will continue offering the RTX 3050 6GB mobile alongside the RTX 4050 6GB mobile into 2025 - and the RTX 2050 4GB will see a replacement in the shape of the RTX 3050 4GB - the latter has a wider 128-bit memory bus.
Under the "GN22-X2" GPU ID, the RTX 5050 mobile is expected to employ the GB207 GPU and 8GB of GDDR7 VRAM. Regarding memory, the premier Blackwell-mobile RTX 5090 mobile allegedly retains a 16GB VRAM configuration - similar to the RTX 5080 mobile and the last-gen RTX 4090 mobile.
Nvidia plans to position Blackwell as the premium offering next year, with last-gen counterparts targeted at budget laptops. This is similar to Intel's approach with its Core 200 CPU family, which uses Alder Lake silicon under the hood.
The RTX 50 "Blackwell" series should be revealed at the upcoming CES 2025 event in January, alongside AMD's Radeon RX 8000 "RDNA 4" GPUs. We anticipate Blackwell mobile being announced at Computex, and it should appear on laptops shortly after.
