Surface Laptop Ultra hands-on: Nvidia RTX Spark brings local AI to Windows on Arm
On Oct 7 Microsoft held a Windows and Surface event in San Francisco with Jensen Huang and Satya Nadella on stage, opening preorders for the RTX Spark N1X-powered Surface Laptop Ultra and the first wave of RTX Spark OEM machines, which ship Oct 16. The top configuration pairs a 20-core Grace CPU, a 6144-CUDA-core Blackwell GPU and up to 128GB of unified memory, with Nvidia claiming up to 1 PFLOPS of AI compute at FP4 with sparsity. In Ifanr's hands-on tests, Qwen3.5 35B-A3B (Q4) ran at about 59.65 tokens/s and Qwen3.8 27B at about 20.98 tokens/s locally under Ollama + Open WebUI, WorkBuddy could download local models and run agent tasks offline, and pricing starts at 21,988 yuan with the 128GB version at 48,388 yuan.
It shows how much local AI a laptop can now carry with 128GB of unified memory, though the pricing keeps the platform aimed at developers and pro users rather than mainstream buyers.