Once upon a time, Microsoft had to write off $900 million betting an Arm-based Nvidia chip could power its first flagship Windows portable, the original Microsoft Surface. But today, it’s trying again. Microsoft and Nvidia have just announced the Surface Laptop Ultra, a computer with a new Arm-based Nvidia chip at its core.
There’s a lot we don’t know about the 15-inch Surface Laptop Ultra, such as its final specs or the foggiest idea of what it might cost. But Microsoft is promising it’s the most powerful Surface, period: “This is the most powerful thing we’ve ever made,” Microsoft Surface boss Andrew Hill replies, when we ask how it stacks up.
It features Nvidia’s new RTX Spark “superchip,” which is roughly the same processor the company already sold in its DGX Spark mini-PC for AI developers, but now optimized to work with Windows 11 instead. That chip has up to 20 CPU cores, 6,144 GPU cores and 128GB of unified memory, though some versions will be sold with as few as 16GB — Nvidia told journalists in briefings 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 of peak HDR brightness, and that it the largest haptic trackpad that Microsoft has ever shipped on a Surface.
It’ll come in dark grey and silver, and should weigh under 4.5 pounds.
Ports include USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, and a full-size SD card slot and headphone jack, though Microsoft isn’t saying what speeds or versions we’re getting from any of them yet. (It looks like we’re getting three USB-C ports?) Instead of those concrete details, its blog post is amusingly filled with statements like these:
The Surface Laptop Ultra won’t be the only machine coming this fall with Nvidia’s new chips, but Microsoft is intimately involved in the success of the other RTX Spark laptops and mini-PCs as well. Microsoft and Nvidia say they’ve been working together for years to get Windows ready for Arm devices like these, and for the RTX Spark specifically.
You can hear more about that in our full RTX Spark story, and in Microsoft’s blog post where it talks about some of the specific tweaks it’s made to take advantage of the RTX Spark, and the developers who’ve been convinced to support Windows on Arm.
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