Overview
- Microsoft and Nvidia unveiled the Surface Laptop Ultra at a San Francisco event Wednesday and opened preorders for a $2,599 base model that Microsoft says will begin shipping on October 16.
- The laptop uses Nvidia’s RTX Spark single‑chip design that pairs an Arm Grace CPU with a Blackwell RTX GPU and a shared LPDDR5X memory pool, with configurations offering up to 20 CPU cores, 6,144 GPU cores and 128GB of unified memory.
- Microsoft and Nvidia say the platform can run models larger than 120 billion parameters and quote up to one petaflop of theoretical FP4 AI performance, a company claim that reporters say requires independent testing to verify real‑world speed.
- Windows will add ‘Hybrid Intelligence’ features so Copilot and other agents can use local models, access files under guarded controls via secure execution containers, and route tasks between local and cloud models for efficiency and privacy.
- Several PC makers including Dell, HP, ASUS, Lenovo and MSI plan RTX Spark laptops this fall, but analysts warn high unified‑memory costs and supply limits may keep these premium machines niche even as developers and creatives gain a new local‑AI option.