Microsoft has announced the Surface Laptop Ultra, its most powerful laptop to date, and it is the first Surface built around an NVIDIA chip instead of Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm. The company is pitching it at "world makers," which is its way of saying creators, developers, and people building AI. It will go on sale later this year, and Microsoft has not announced a price.
The big deal here is the chip, which Microsoft calls RTX Spark. It is the same NVIDIA silicon that powers the DGX Spark, a little desktop AI computer that sells for $3,999 to $4,699. So Microsoft has basically taken NVIDIA's AI machine and turned it into a 15-inch laptop. It has 128GB of memory that the processor and graphics chip share back and forth depending on what your work needs.
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A laptop built to run AI on its own
What that buys you is the ability to run large AI models locally, on the laptop itself, without sending anything off to the cloud. Microsoft says it can handle models up to 120 billion parameters on the device. That is the kind of thing only AI developers and researchers really need, so this is a niche machine despite all the "makers" talk.
It does invite an obvious MacBook Pro comparison, since Apple's top laptop also offers 128GB of memory and is already popular for running AI models at home. The NVIDIA chip's edge is that it works with CUDA, the software that most of the AI world is built on and that Macs can't run. A maxed-out MacBook Pro with 128GB of memory runs $7,349, so I would not expect this Surface to be cheap.
NVIDIA chip aside, the rest looks like a really nice laptop. The 15-inch mini-LED touchscreen hits up to 2,000 nits of brightness, which Microsoft says is the brightest display it has ever shipped. You also get the biggest touchpad on any Surface and a full set of ports: HDMI, USB-C, USB-A, an SD card slot, and a headphone jack. Microsoft also promises all-day battery life, though that is based on its own testing of pre-release units, so I would wait and see whether that claim holds up. The laptop weighs under 4.5 pounds and will come in Platinum and Nightfall.
My hesitation about the Surface Laptop Ultra stems from Microsoft's recent modus operandi: Microsoft is all over the place with its hardware and AI strategy right now, and Windows itself is in a rough patch with a series of buggy updates. The company can absolutely nail hardware when it wants to, so I am hoping this is the good version of Microsoft showing up. But a lot of the experience will come down to whether the raw power can paper over Windows' rough edges.
[Image credit: Microsoft]
