Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop Ultra this morning, which it described as the most powerful Surface laptop yet and the first to run on Nvidia's new ARM-based RTX Spark platform. It comes with a Blackwell RTX GPU and full CUDA support, and is pitched at creators, developers and anyone running large language models on their own machine.
With 128GB of unified memory, shared between the CPU and GPU, the promise is to run 120 billion parameter models locally with 1 petaflop of AI compute. The top spec reportedly has up to 20 CPU cores and 6,144 CUDA cores and if you have to ask you can't afford it.
The screen is a 15-inch mini-LED PixelSense Ultra touchscreen, 2,000 nits at peak HDR brightness, 262 pixels per inch. It weighs a little under 4.5 pounds, comes in "Platinum" and "Nightfall" (black and silver), and has HDMI, USB-C, USB-A, SD card and headphone ports.
If "Spark" tickles your memory, it's because of the tiny $4500 workstation built for local model work with similar specifications. "ARM chips with unified memory" made Apple Silicon fast and efficient when it landed in 2020 and being able to shift all that RAM to GPUs made it great for local AI tinkering. Even low-end Macs are hard to find, what with all the OpenClaw hype.
Should be fine to game, too, and for less memory-intensive work than AI, but let's see the price/config curve. The Surface Laptop Ultra ships later this year; there'll be similarly-equipped Spark models from Asus, Acer, Dell and other PC makers, likely detailed later today.
