Microsoft Unveils Surface Laptop Ultra with Nvidia's RTX Spark Chip

Dell, Asus, Lenovo, HP, MSI, Acer, and Gigabyte are among the PC makers that are designing systems around Nvidia’s RTX Spark, Nvidia’s new Arm-based chip for Windows PCs. But the flagship RTX Spark PC may be from the same company that makes Windows: the new Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra is a high-end RTX Spark system that will offer up to 128GB of unified memory for “creators, developers, and AI builders.”

Microsoft says the Laptop Ultra will be available “later this year” but didn’t discuss any specific pricing or configuration options.

The Laptop Ultra will slot in above the regular Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Surface Laptops in Microsoft’s lineup. Microsoft has made high-end Surface devices with more powerful CPUs and GPUs before, but to date, they’ve also come with convertible designs that may have limited their appeal. The first was the old Surface Book, with its fully detachable screen and bendy-straw hinge that didn’t close all the way; the second was the Surface Laptop Studio, with its chunky design and sliding screen. The Laptop Ultra is Microsoft’s first attempt to follow the MacBook Pro formula: it’s like the other Surface Laptops, just with more power.

Microsoft says the Laptop Ultra will include USB-A, USB-C, and HDMI ports, as well as an SD card slot and headphone jack. It’s said to include a haptic trackpad that’s “the largest we’ve ever put on a Surface.” A 15-inch PixelSense display offers up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness.

As for the internal specs, Nvidia’s RTX Spark includes up to 20 Arm CPU cores (10 large high-performance cores, and 10 mid-sized cores with better efficiency) and up to 6,144 Blackwell-based GPU cores. This gives the high-end RTX Spark roughly the same computing resources as a desktop GeForce RTX 5070, though in a lower 80 W power envelope and attached to slower LPDDR5x RAM rather than GDDR7.

But the chip’s biggest advantage for AI developers and some gamers may be the system’s pool of unified memory. A typical RTX 5070 can access only 8GB or 12GB of memory; the RTX Spark’s built-in GPU will likely be able to access nearly all of the system’s built-in memory. Even a laptop with 32GB of RAM could devote more of that memory to the GPU than a GeForce RTX 4090 or 5090 could.

Gaming is still a relatively weak point for the Arm version of Windows, but Nvidia and Microsoft have said that they’re working with the developers of popular online games that rely on kernel-level anti-cheat software to make those titles run on Arm systems. Microsoft’s Prism x86-to-Arm code translation technology and an increasing number of Arm-native third-party apps have made Arm-powered Windows PCs feel a lot more like regular Windows devices than they used to.

Microsoft has used Nvidia’s chips in Surface PCs before, if you count the first Surface RT models. These ran an Arm-native version of Windows 8 that was limited mostly to apps downloaded from the Microsoft Store and offered no x86-to-Arm code translation. While the work done on Windows RT was no doubt the foundation that the Arm versions of Windows 10 and Windows 11 were built on, Windows RT quickly failed and vanished, along with Nvidia Tegra-based PCs.