What you can look forward to: Microsoft just announced the starting price and release date for its new ultra-tier Surface laptop, as well as other notebooks with Nvidia’s RTX Spark SoC. The company’s flagship model is expensive, even next to the MacBook Pro it’s meant to compete with, but it remains to be seen how RTX Spark compares to Apple’s M5 Pro.
Pre-orders for the Surface Laptop Ultra and other laptops based on the same Arm-based SoC are now open, marking Nvidia’s entry into the PC CPU market. Microsoft’s model starts at $2,600 with 24GB of unified storage.
As previously announced, the base configuration uses a variant of Nvidia’s new RTX Spark SoC with 5,120 Blackwell CUDA cores and an 18-core Arm-based CPU. The notebook can be configured with 24GB, 32GB, 48GB, 64GB or 128GB of unified LPDDR5X memory, potentially offering the highest addressable memory ever on an RTX GPU.
Buyers can choose between a 512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD or a PCIe 5.0 drive with 1TB or 2TB of storage, both interchangeable.
Nvidia and Microsoft primarily promoted RTX Spark’s local AI powers, but its gaming capabilities could also have a significant impact on the Arm and integrated GPU markets.
The top-of-the-line RTX Spark chip combines a 20-core CPU with an integrated GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, which Nvidia says delivers the same performance as the laptop version of the RTX 5070. Microsoft confirmed that Gears of War: E-Day will support the chip and Windows on Arm natively. Call of Duty is set to follow in 2027, joining other games from EA, Ubisoft and Sega. RTX Spark is the first laptop SoC to support Nvidia DLSS, G-Sync, Reflex and RTX ray tracing.
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) October 7, 2026
Microsoft’s new flagship laptop features a 15-inch 4K touchscreen with Dolby Vision IQ support and refresh rates of up to 120 Hz. The company claims the battery is good for up to 15 hours of local video playback and 12 hours of web browsing.
Surface Laptop Ultra’s ports include the first integrated magnetic USB-C charging port that charges up to 140W. The other two USB-C ports support DisplayPort 2.1 and, together with the HDMI 2.1b port, can drive up to three 4K displays at 60 Hz. A USB-A port completes the offer.
Other RTX Spark laptops shipping on October 16 include the Dell XPS 16, HP OmniBook Ultra 16, Lenovo Yoga Pro 9n, MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI+ and Asus ProArt P16.
Prices are now available for most of them: the Asus and MSI notebooks start at $3,400 and $3,300, respectively, while the models from Dell, HP and Lenovo are listed at $3,800, $3,200 and around $3,000.
Microsoft has also opened pre-orders for the RTX Spark Dev Box. Starting at $6,000, it includes the full RTX Spark SoC and up to 1 petaflop of local AI computing power.
