Microsoft and Nvidia made joint announcements today. Microsoft is launching a brand-new Surface Laptop Ultra, the most powerful Surface Laptop ever built, and it is powered by Nvidia’s new RTX Spark system-on-a-chip, a “new superchip that reinvents Windows PCs for the era of personal AI agents.”
Nvidia describes RTX Spark as designed for “AI, creating, and gaming”. It promises it delivers both power and efficiency, making it ideal for ultra-thin, lightweight laptops like the Microsoft Surface Ultra.
“The PC is being reinvented,” says Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder and CEO. “For forty years, you launched apps. Click. Type. With RTX Spark and Microsoft Windows, you ask — and the PC does the work. RTX Spark brings everything NVIDIA has built — CUDA, RTX, our AI platform — into a single superchip. Local agents. Frontier models. Creative workflows. RTX games. All on a laptop. This is the new PC. The personal AI computer.”
While there are many AI-related buzzwords here, there is nonetheless interesting hardware on offer. The RTX Spark features an Nvidia Blackwell RTX GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores and fifth-generation Tensor Cores. It features a high-performance, efficient 20-core Nvidia Grace CPU. Nvidia worked with MediaTek on a custom CPU design, promising “best-in-class power efficiency, performance, and connectivity.”
Essentially, Nvidia (and Microsoft) want a piece of the lightweight but powerful laptop space that Apple has dominated in the Apple Silicon era.
Microsoft notes that it has targeted performance, efficiency, and style across the board with Surface Ultra. It is Microsoft’s first laptop to include an Nvidia Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 128GB of unified memory and full CUDA support, for starters. It also promises to be quiet, efficient, and pretty.
“Uncompromising craft meets raw power. Built for world makers who demand cutting-edge performance and portability,” Microsoft promises.
To that end, the notebook features an all-new thermal system designed for heavy, professional-grade workloads. Microsoft says the new thermal system has up to 2.5 times the thermal capacity of the Surface Laptop 7th edition 15-inch.
The 15-inch laptop features a mini-LED PixelSense Ultra touchscreen with a 3:2 aspect ratio, 262 PPI resolution, and up to 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness. Microsoft also touts its color performance, saying the screen is designed for “pros who make critical color and exposure decisions.”
The Surface Ultra Laptop promises all-day battery life, a compact and pocketable charger, and a 30% larger touchpad with haptic feedback. The laptop boasts a “full set of maker-friendly ports,” including USB-C, USB-A, and HDMI, plus a headphone jack and SD card slot.
While both Microsoft and Nvidia are emphasizing the RTX Spark’s AI capabilities, it is important to consider that this matters beyond the agentic AI features Microsoft is adding to Windows. It also matters beyond AI-powered vibe coding or generative AI apps. Many of the creative applications photographers and videographers use every day, including Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, and others, rely heavily on AI for many of their latest features. Many creative apps use AI for masking, for example, and those rely on neural processing power. It’s easy to dismiss much of the AI hype as irrelevant to those who actually create art in the real world, but AI is increasingly part of creative software.
Adobe has already publicly committed to fine-tuning its creative apps, such as Photoshop and Premiere, specifically for RTX Spark. Lots of other companies are on board, including Blackmagic Design, CapCut, Filmora, Blender, Topaz Labs, and more.
“The best creative work in the world happens in Adobe tools from Adobe Firefly to Photoshop and Premiere, and the expansion of our partnership with Nvidia and Microsoft will make those experiences faster and more powerful than ever,” says Shantanu Narayen, chair and CEO of Adobe. “Together, we are building AI-native creative experiences for RTX Spark that deliver the performance, intelligence and responsiveness people need to create at the pace of their ambition.”
While the big news today focuses on Nvidia’s RTX Spark and the Microsoft Surface Ultra, Nvidia explains that RTX Spark is not exclusive to Microsoft’s upcoming Surface laptop. The RTX Spark will also feature in Asus ProArt P14 and P16 laptops, the Dell XPS 16, HP OmniBook models, Lenovo Yoga Pro devices, and MSI Prestige N16 laptops.
All of these RTX Spark-powered notebooks are currently slated to arrive this fall, so many details remain unknown, including full configuration specs and pricing. However, Nvidia says its RTX Spark will feature in machines across a diverse range of price points and enable thinner, lighter, and more efficient laptop designs.
The era of the chunky, load, LED-laden gaming PC laptop may very well be over. Apple’s MacBooks have long won on style, but initial reveals of RTX Spark-based machines suggest the aesthetic gap between Mac and Windows may be closing.
Image credits: Nvidia, Microsoft
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