Nvidia RTX Spark and Surface Laptop Ultra: Your questions answered
Everything you wanted to know
The Surface Laptop Ultra is a new laptop from Microsoft that runs on Nvidia RTX Spark, a powerful Windows on Arm platform. Priced starting at $2,599.99, the most expensive version costs $5,899.99 and features a 6,144-core GPU, 128GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage. Battery life varies, with 10 hours being possible but closer to two hours when used intensively.
It is recommended to keep it plugged in most of the time due to performance and efficiency concerns. The laptop performs well for tasks like fine-tuning models with at least 12 billion parameters, with Qwen3.6 35B proving to be faster than Qwen3.8 27B. The trackpad experience is comparable to that of a MacBook Pro, thanks to Microsoft's recent improvements in touchpad quality.
However, the CPU power is not as strong, relying on MediaTek's custom Arm cores instead of Nvidia's GPU and unified memory. While it cannot run all software, especially games, it can handle gaming through emulation and supports local LLM workflows without requiring cloud-based AI services. The power adapter is the most powerful for a Surface laptop, but the cable is short and can be purchased separately.
The Surface Laptop Ultra is not meant to compete with the MacBook Air, with the regular Surface Laptop being a better alternative for those use cases.
Written by urgent.news from XDA Developers's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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