Once upon a time, Microsoft had to forgive $900 million betting that an Arm-based Nvidia chip could power its first flagship Windows portable, the original Microsoft Surface. But today, it is trying again. Microsoft and Nvidia recently announced the Surface Laptop Ultra, a computer with a new Arm-based Nvidia chip.
There’s a lot about the 15-inch Surface Laptop Ultra we don’t know, like its final features or a vague idea of what it might cost. But Microsoft is promising it’s the most powerful Surface, period: “It’s the most powerful thing we’ve made,” answers Microsoft Surface boss Andrew Hill, when we ask how it stacks up.
It features Nvidia’s new RTX Spark “superchip,” which is pretty much the same processor the company already sold in its DGX Spark mini-PCs for AI developers, but now optimized to work with Windows 11 instead. That chip has 20 CPU cores, 6,144 GPU cores and 128GB of integrated memory, though some versions will be sold with up to 16GB — Nvidia told reporters in the briefing that the RTX Spark family will eventually expand to reach a range of prices.
In addition to that chip, which should offer the typical “all-day battery life,” roughly RTX 5070 laptop-level graphics, and up to 1 petaflop of AI compute, the Surface Laptop will have a 15-inch mini-LED touchscreen at 262 pixels per inch. Microsoft says it’s “the brightest display we’ve ever shipped” with 2,000 nits peak HDR brightness, and it’s the largest haptic trackpad Microsoft has ever shipped on a Surface.
It will come in dark brown and silver colors and should weigh less than 4.5 pounds.
Ports include USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, and a full-sized SD card slot and headphone jack, though Microsoft isn’t yet revealing what speeds or versions we’ll be getting from any of these. (Looks like we’re getting three USB-C ports?) Instead of those concrete details, its blog post is filled with statements like this:
The Surface Laptop Ultra won’t be the only machine arriving with Nvidia’s new chips this autumn, but Microsoft is also deeply involved in the success of other RTX Spark laptops and mini-PCs. Microsoft and Nvidia say they’ve been working together for years to get Windows ready for such Arm devices, and specifically RTX Spark.
You can hear about it in our full RTX Spark story and in Microsoft’s blog post, where it talks about some of the specific changes made to take advantage of RTX Spark and the developers who have been reassured to support Windows on Arm.
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