Microsoft Opens Surface Laptop Ultra Preorders
- •Microsoft opened preorders for the RTX Spark-powered Surface Laptop Ultra on October 7.
- •The Surface Laptop Ultra starts at ¥513,480 and is scheduled to ship October 16.
- •The $5,999 Dev Box supports AI models with more than 120 billion parameters.
Microsoft opened preorders on October 7 local time for the Surface Laptop Ultra, a laptop powered by the RTX Spark processor it developed with NVIDIA. The Japanese sales page lists a starting price of ¥513,480, with shipping scheduled for October 16. The device is aimed at creators and developers, with hardware designed to improve on-device AI processing.
Microsoft says the Surface Laptop Ultra can support AI coding assistance that combines GitHub Copilot with local models. It is less than 18 mm thick, weighs 2.0 kg and has a 15-inch touchscreen. It supports charging through Magnetic Connect, a magnetic USB-C connection, and comes in Platinum and Nightfall.
A configuration with a 6,144-core GPU and 20-core CPU starts at ¥707,080. It is the only configuration available with 128 GB of memory; that version costs ¥1,094,280. Microsoft is also releasing the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a compact desktop for AI development. The company says it can process AI models with more than 120 billion parameters. It comes with Visual Studio Code, Git and GitHub CLI preinstalled, costs $5,999 and is sold exclusively through Microsoft's U.S. website.
NVIDIA announced RTX Spark in June for Windows PCs. It uses a Blackwell-generation RTX GPU and offers up to 1 petaflop of AI computing performance in FP4 format, a Grace CPU with up to 20 cores, and up to 128 GB of unified memory, which combines memory for the processor and graphics. ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and MSI also plan to release RTX Spark laptops.