Microsoft Announces Surface Laptop Ultra With Nvidia RTX Spark Chip

Microsoft has just announced the Surface Laptop Ultra, which will be powered by Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chip for premium ARM-based laptops and mini PCs. The Surface Laptop Ultra will start shipping later this fall alongside other RTX Spark-powered devices, and Microsoft said that it’s “the most powerful Surface Laptop ever built.”

Surface devices have never shipped with the latest and greatest specs, and that was true even for premium models like the now-discontinued Surface Book and Surface Laptop Studio. However, the Surface Laptop Ultra should be a different story thanks to Nvidia’s RTX Spark, which will bring the full stack NVIDIA AI and RTX graphics technology to Windows on ARM PCs.

The Surface Laptop Ultra is a 15-inch laptop with a mini-LED “PixelSense Ultra” touchscreen display offering up to 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness, “the brightest display we’ve ever shipped,” Microsoft said. The new laptop will also offer the largest touchpad ever seen on a Surface device, and it will support the new haptic feedback effects that Microsoft recently implemented on Windows 11.

While Microsoft’s blog post is a bit light on hardware details, we know that the Surface Laptop Ultra will be available in two finishes, Platinum and Nightfall. The laptop will also offer a large selection of ports including HDMI, USB-C, USB-A, SD card, and a headphone jack. Under the hood, the Nvidia RTX Spark chip will offer up to 20 CPU cores, 6,144 GPU cores, 128GB of unified memory, and 1 petaflop of AI compute.

“We designed Surface Laptop Ultra from the inside out,” said Brett Ostrum, Corporate Vice President, Surface. “Mechanical, electrical, thermal, acoustic, materials, industrial design and software engineers at the table from day one. The internal architecture and the external form built as one system. Our engineers designed it with the same discipline we know you bring to your craft, where every micron matters and every choice is deliberate.”

Microsoft’s Surface devices always came with premium pricing, and the company announcing a $1,949 starting price for its latest 13.8-inch Surface Laptop for Business isn’t exactly reassuring. Anyway, Microsoft won’t share more details about the hardware and pricing until later this year.