Fastest AI laptop ever built keeps its crown for now as Nvidia unleashes RTX mobile workstations — $18,600 Dell Pro Max 18 Plus laptop doubled in price in 14 months, and it could be unseated within days
Dell's expensive workstation combines strong AI results with high bandwidth, but RTX Spark's larger shared memory may accommodate models Dell cannot load.
Dell's Pro Max 18 Plus laptop currently holds the title of the fastest AI laptop, topping local AI rankings ahead of other machines tested. The RTX PRO 5000 chip manages impressive token generation rates: 185.1 tokens per second on the Phi model, 140.5 tokens per second on Mistral, and 119.7 tokens per second on Llama 3. However, this lead may be challenged within days as Nvidia prepares to release RTX Spark laptops on October 16, 2026.
Several manufacturers, including Microsoft and Dell, will offer RTX Spark models with preorders already open. RTX Spark boasts an impressive 1 petaflop of FP4 AI performance, 6,144 CUDA cores, and up to 128 GB of shared memory. While RTX Spark's shared memory can accommodate models with larger parameter counts than Dell's workstation, the latter's memory bandwidth of 896 GB/s is significantly higher than RTX Spark's 300 GB/s.
As Nvidia's performance claims are based on sparsity-optimized calculations, real-world AI workloads may not reach the upper limits.
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