The Microsoft Surface RTX Spark Dev Box Is NVIDIA’s Answer To AMD’s Ryzen AI Halo

Microsoft unveiled a new Surface RTX Spark Dev Box at its recent keynote, alongside the Surface Laptop Ultra. This AI workstation is built around the same NVIDIA RTX Spark SoC, but in a desktop form factor, and it comes at a steep price of US$5,999 (~RM24,546), which is about $2,000 more than AMD's Ryzen AI Halo workstation that was announced earlier this year.

The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box boasts a more powerful configuration than AMD's, with 192GB of Unified Memory, compared to AMD's 128GB. It also features an RTX Spark N1X chipset with 6,144 Blackwell CUDA cores, 128GB LPDDR5X Unified Memory, and a 2TB PCIe 5.0 SSD. The desktop workstation is engineered for continuous workloads, with a 100W thermal envelope.

It includes two USB-C ports, a 5Gbps USB-A port, an HDMI 2.1b, a LAN port, Wi-Fi 7, and a 165W PSU. In contrast, AMD's Ryzen AI Halo workstation is powered by AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 395 or Max+ Pro 495 APUs, offering up to 192GB of LPDDR5X-8000 Unified Memory, up to 2TB of PCIe 4.0 storage, and a 120W TDP. It starts at $3,999 (~RM16,539).

The RTX Spark-powered device can handle 120 billion parameters, whereas AMD's Ryzen AI Halo workstation can manage up to 300 billion. The AI software platforms differ as well, with NVIDIA utilizing CUDA and TensorRT, and AMD using ROCm and Pytorch. Both platforms support Windows 11 and Linux. Preorders for the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box are currently open, with shipments slated for November 24th.