Microsoft and Nvidia finally showed their hand. At a Surface event in San Francisco on October 7, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage to attach a price and a ship date to the Surface Laptop Ultra: it starts at $2,599 and goes on sale October 16.
The headline is not the laptop, though — it is the chip inside. The Surface Laptop Ultra is the debut platform for Nvidia's RTX Spark, an Arm-based PC chip that pairs a Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 6,144 cores and a Grace CPU with up to 20 cores. It supports up to 128GB of unified memory. This is Nvidia's first serious play for the Windows PC market, long dominated by Intel and AMD, and Microsoft is betting the combination can shift real AI work off its Azure cloud and onto the machines customers already own.
Microsoft is aiming squarely at Apple's MacBook Pro. The company says the 15-inch Ultra is built for "demanding creative, software development, AI, engineering, and 3D workloads," and it undercuts Apple's $2,999 16-inch MacBook Pro by $400. The pitch: run substantial AI models locally, without round-tripping to the cloud. Microsoft claims the machine can handle models with more than 120 billion parameters on-device.
Because RTX Spark is Arm-based, the Ultra runs Windows on Arm, with existing x86 apps handled by Microsoft's Prism emulation layer. That is the same playbook as Qualcomm's Snapdragon X machines, and app compatibility will make or break the experience for anyone with a specialized workflow. Worth watching closely in reviews.
The hardware itself looks thoughtful. You get a mini-LED touchscreen display that Microsoft calls its brightest and most vivid ever on a Surface, with peak HDR brightness claimed 25% higher than the M5 MacBook Pro's. There is a large haptic trackpad, upgradeable storage, and — in a quiet break with Surface tradition — Magnetic Connect, which Microsoft calls the world's first built-in magnetic USB-C charging on a laptop. Goodbye, proprietary Surface Connect port. Ports are generous: three USB-C, one USB-A, HDMI, a full SD card reader, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Microsoft also opened preorders for the $5,999 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a mini PC aimed at developers that promises up to 1 petaflop of AI performance. And in a fun footnote, Microsoft noted Gears of War: E-Day runs at 60fps on the Ultra, with Call of Duty headed to RTX Spark machines in 2027.
The big question is whether Windows on Nvidia silicon can deliver the compatibility and battery life to convert skeptics. October 16 is when we start getting answers.