The Surface Laptop Ultra is the most powerful Surface yet, thanks to NVIDIA's RTX Spark
Key takeaways
- Microsoft's latest Surface is basically a Mac Book Pro clone.
- Microsoft Microsoft hasn't had great look with its beefier Surface notebooks.
- "This is the most powerful thing we've ever made," Andrew Hill, Microsoft's Corporate VP of Surface, said in a briefing with reporters.
Microsoft's latest Surface is basically a Mac Book Pro clone.
Microsoft Microsoft hasn't had great look with its beefier Surface notebooks. The original Surface Book looked very cool, but it was bulky and cursed with old hardware. The Surface Laptop Studio took two generations to live up to its potential, and by then it was also terribly expensive. Now Microsoft is making another grab for power users with the Surface Laptop Ultra, a 15-inch beast of a machine using NVIDIA's RTX Spark system-on-a-chip for powerful graphics and AI performance. It's a straightforward MacBook Pro competitor, with no weird hinges or removable screens like the previous high-end Surface notebooks.
"This is the most powerful thing we've ever made," Andrew Hill, Microsoft's Corporate VP of Surface, said in a briefing with reporters. NVIDIA's RTX Spark is its big attempt at competing with AMD and Qualcomm's latest chips, and it's notable for including 6,144 Blackwell GPU cores and 20 Arm CPU cores. NVIDIA claims its offers 1 petaflop worth of AI performance (including its GPUs, CPU and NPU), and says its graphics performance is similar to the RTX 5070 laptop GPU (but with a power draw between single-digits and 80W).