Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra debuts with RTX Spark SoC

Microsoft has opened pre-orders for the Surface Laptop Ultra, the high-end laptop it announced at Computex earlier this year and which is powered by Nvidia's RTX Spark system-on-chip. The device is available now through Microsoft's online store and select retailers worldwide, with prices starting at $2,599; open sales begin October 16.

Pre-orders begin now at $2,599, with open sales starting October 16.

Microsoft is offering up to $1,000 cashback when customers trade in an eligible MacBook Pro toward a Surface Laptop Ultra. Separately, Microsoft has listed the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box at $5,999. The Dev Box is available for pre-order in the United States and is scheduled to begin shipping in November.

Specifications and positioning

The Surface Laptop Ultra uses Nvidia's RTX Spark SoC, which combines a Blackwell-generation RTX GPU with up to 6,144 cores and an Nvidia Grace CPU with up to 20 cores. Microsoft pairs that SoC with 128GB of unified memory; unified memory means the CPU and GPU share the same 128GB pool rather than using separate, dedicated pools for each processor.

Microsoft describes the laptop's display as a 15-inch mini-LED touchscreen and says its peak HDR brightness is up to 25 percent higher than the MacBook Pro M5, according to Microsoft. The company has not provided additional independent measurements in the announcement.

The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box uses the same RTX Spark SoC and up to 128GB of unified memory. Microsoft positions the Dev Box against Apple models such as the Mac Studio and Mac mini and advertises up to 1 petaflop of AI performance; one petaflop equals 1,000,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second, a peak throughput metric for certain AI workloads.