Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra with Nvidia RTX Spark starts at $2,599; Dev Box $5,999
Microsoft unveiled its new Surface Laptop Ultra, presented by CEO Satya Nadella and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, built on Nvidia's RTX Spark platform (a chip co-developed with MediaTek) with up to 128GB of unified memory. According to cnBeta, the laptop starts at $2,599 in the US with shipments scheduled for the following Friday, offering a 15-inch mini-LED touchscreen, up to 1 petaflop of AI performance, and support for running local models with up to 120 billion parameters. Microsoft also opened preorders for the developer-focused Surface RTX Spark Dev Box at $5,999 with 128GB of unified memory, shipping in November with a Project Zenith Windows 11 Pro setup and preinstalled tools including Visual Studio Code, Git, GitHub CLI and GitHub Copilot.
It shows Microsoft and Nvidia pushing agents and local model inference onto personal devices, though rising memory prices and high sticker prices leave the economics of on-device AI unproven.