Overview
- Microsoft and Nvidia unveiled the Surface Laptop Ultra at a San Francisco event on Wednesday, with preorders open and shipping set to begin October 16 for the laptop and November for the $5,999 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box.
- The laptop uses Nvidia’s RTX Spark SoC in two variants offering up to a 20-core Arm CPU, up to 6,144 Blackwell CUDA cores, and up to 128GB of unified LPDDR5X memory, which Microsoft says can run models of roughly 120 billion parameters and deliver up to about one petaflop of FP4 AI compute.
- Microsoft priced the base Surface Laptop Ultra at $2,599 and offers higher-end configurations up to roughly $5,899, positioning the device for developers and creators and including a MacBook Pro trade-in incentive for targeted buyers.
- Windows 11 is getting specific features for local AI: Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC) to sandbox agents, a revamped Copilot with agent and file-action controls, and 'Hybrid Intelligence' routing that can choose local models or cloud services for work.
- OEMs including Dell, HP, Asus, Lenovo, MSI, and Acer will ship RTX Spark laptops in October, but reporters note that vendor performance claims, battery and thermal behavior, and the impact of high memory prices still need independent testing and will shape how fast these premium machines are adopted.