Microsoft has opened preorders for its new ultra-tier Surface Laptop Ultra and other notebooks powered by Nvidia’s RTX Spark SoC, marking Nvidia’s entry into the PC CPU market. The Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599 with 24GB of unified memory.
Even next to the MacBook Pro it is meant to rival, Microsoft’s flagship is expensive. How RTX Spark stacks up against Apple’s M5 Pro remains to be seen.
The base Surface configuration uses a variant of Nvidia’s new RTX Spark SoC with 5,120 Blackwell CUDA cores and an 18-core Arm-based CPU. The notebook can be configured with 24GB, 32GB, 48GB, 64GB, or 128GB of unified LPDDR5X memory-potentially offering the most addressable memory ever on an RTX GPU.
Storage options include a 512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD or a PCIe 5.0 drive with 1TB or 2TB. Both are removable.
Nvidia and Microsoft have mainly highlighted RTX Spark’s ability to run AI locally. Its gaming performance, however, could also affect the Arm and integrated GPU markets. The highest-end model has a 20-core CPU and an integrated GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, which Nvidia says is comparable to the laptop RTX 5070.
Microsoft confirmed native Windows on Arm support for Gears of War: E-Day on RTX Spark, with Call of Duty arriving in 2027 alongside titles from EA, Ubisoft and Sega. On the feature side, it’s the first laptop SoC to offer the full Nvidia stack: DLSS, G-Sync, Reflex, and RTX ray tracing.
Microsoft’s new flagship laptop has a 15-inch 4K touchscreen with Dolby Vision IQ support and a refresh rate of up to 120Hz. The company rates the battery at up to 15 hours of local video playback and 12 hours of web browsing.
The Surface Laptop Ultra includes what Microsoft describes as the first built-in magnetic USB-C charging port, which supports up to 140W. Two additional USB-C ports support DisplayPort 2.1 and, along with an HDMI 2.1b port, can drive up to three 4K displays at 60Hz. A USB-A port completes the selection.
Five other RTX Spark laptops will ship on October 16: the Dell XPS 16, HP OmniBook Ultra 16, Lenovo Yoga Pro 9n, MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI+ and Asus ProArt P16. Most now have pricing. The Asus starts at $3,400 and the MSI at $3,300, while the Dell is listed at $3,800, the HP at $3,200, and the Lenovo at roughly $3,000.
Preorders are also open for the RTX Spark Dev Box, which starts at $6,000. It’s built on the full RTX Spark SoC and delivers up to 1 petaflop of on-device AI compute.
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