Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra pairs NVIDIA RTX Spark silicon with Windows on Arm

Microsoft used Computex 2026 to unveil the Surface Laptop Ultra, its most powerful Surface ever and an explicit shot at Apple’s MacBook Pro. The flagship runs Windows on Arm atop NVIDIA’s new RTX Spark platform — a 20-core Grace CPU co-developed with MediaTek paired with a Blackwell RTX GPU sporting up to 6,144 CUDA cores and FP4 Tensor Cores, linked by NVLink-C2C. Up to 128GB of unified memory is shared dynamically between CPU and GPU, enough to run 120B-parameter models locally, with Microsoft claiming roughly one petaflop of AI compute.

The 15-inch chassis weighs under 4.5 pounds and carries a 2,880×1,920 mini-LED display peaking at 2,000 nits, a haptic trackpad, dual-fan cooling, and a full port array including HDMI, USB-A/C, SD, and headphone jack. The SSD is user-replaceable and Microsoft is promising repair guides and parts. Windows 11 has been retuned around the silicon with a new workload scheduler, expanded GPU-accessible memory limits, an optimized Prism x86 emulator using AVX/AVX2, and new containment primitives for NVIDIA’s OpenShell runtime that sandbox local AI agents like Hermes and OpenClaw.

The gaming and creative software story is unusually strong for Arm: Epic and BattlEye anti-cheat are supported natively, Riot and KRAFTON are shipping native titles, and Adobe is rearchitecting Premiere and Photoshop around TensorRT and unified memory. Pricing wasn’t disclosed but is expected to be steep given RAM supply constraints; ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and MSI are launching RTX Spark machines alongside it. Ships fall 2026.