Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra Integrates NVIDIA RTX Spark for AI Performance

Microsoft unveiled its latest Surface hardware, designed for the AI era. The new Surface Laptop Ultra and Surface RTX Spark Dev Box utilize NVIDIA's RTX Spark platform, large unified memory, and Microsoft's design principles.

The Surface Laptop Ultra, a laptop, and the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a desktop, both incorporate NVIDIA's RTX Spark superchip. This silicon combines an NVIDIA Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 6,144 cores and a Grace CPU with up to 20 cores. Coupled with up to 128 GB of unified memory, the platform achieves up to one petaflop of AI performance. It can run AI models exceeding 120 billion parameters directly on the device, without cloud reliance.

NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang described this hardware as redefining personal computers, especially in an era of AI agents. He stated, "The personal computer is the ultimate tool, it’s my ultimate tool, and for a whole generation of people, it’s our ultimate tool. What happens in the era of agents, when the agent is on your computer? It is now your personal assistant."

The Surface Laptop Ultra features a chassis under 18 mm thick and weighing under 4.5 lb. It sports a 15-inch PixelSense Ultra touchscreen capable of reaching 2,000 nits peak HDR brightness, exceeding the MacBook Pro M5's brightness by 25%. Its new thermal design offers 2.5 times the thermal capacity of current Surface Laptops, and storage is user-removable. The laptop also introduces Magnetic Connect, a built-in magnetic USB-C charging system. For gaming, it supports ray tracing, DLSS, and NVIDIA Reflex on Windows on Arm.

The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is a compact desktop targeting developers and AI engineers. It comes pre-loaded with tools like Visual Studio Code, Git, GitHub Copilot, WSL, Python, and Node as part of Microsoft’s Project Zenith family. Currently exclusive to Microsoft's U.S. store, it costs $5,999 and will ship in November.

Pre-orders for the Surface Laptop Ultra are open. It starts at $2,599 in the U.S. and $3,899.99 in Canada, with a release date of October 16. Microsoft is also offering up to $1,000 cash back for eligible MacBook Pro trade-ins through November 23 in the U.S. and Canada.