Overview
- Microsoft and Nvidia revealed the new hardware at a San Francisco event on Wednesday, Oct. 7, opened preorders the same day and said the Surface Laptop Ultra ships Oct. 16 while the $5,999 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box ships in November.
- The Surface Laptop Ultra is offered in two RTX Spark configurations with up to a 20‑core Arm CPU, a Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 6,144 CUDA cores and up to 128GB of unified LPDDR5X memory shared between CPU and GPU.
- Microsoft and Nvidia say the platform can run large models locally — roughly 120 billion parameters in some cases — and quote a theoretical peak of about one petaflop of FP4 AI compute for select configurations.
- Windows 11 will add Execution Containers, a Hybrid Intelligence model for routing work between local and cloud models, and deeper Copilot integrations to sandbox agents and control their file and network access.
- Multiple PC makers including Dell, HP, Asus, Lenovo and MSI plan RTX Spark laptops that start in the $2,600–$3,800 range and higher end configurations approach $6,000, raising immediate questions about sustained battery life, thermals, real‑world performance and developer adoption.