Microsoft has introduced the Surface Laptop Ultra, the first device featuring the Nvidia RTX Spark SoC. The laptop starts at $2,599 and offers configurations with up to 128GB of LPDDR5x memory and either 5120-core or 6144-core Blackwell GPUs. Pre-orders are open, with shipping scheduled for October 16.
The company also unveiled the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a $5,999 workstation designed for AI development. It features 128GB of unified memory and provides one petaflop of AI compute performance. The device includes a developer-optimized version of Windows 11 and a chassis design incorporating 1,000 air vents.
Windows 11 is receiving updates to support local AI models, including a redesigned Copilot interface and new system-level task execution via the search bar. Microsoft is also introducing Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), a security framework that allows administrators to sandbox agent activities and monitor access.
The new Hybrid Intelligence initiative shifts focus from cloud-based AI to local processing. This approach enables users to manage memory allocation for specific applications and provides native support for local frameworks such as llama.cpp, as well as models from the Deepseek and Nvidia Nemotron families.
