Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra packs an Nvidia Spark chip — and it could be a MacBook Pro killer

The Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra is the company’s answer to the MacBook Pro. Announced during Nvidia’s Computex 2026 presentation, this laptop is among the first to feature the newly announced Nvidia RTX Spark chip. It promises to be powerful enough to handle creative workloads, development, local AI use, and gaming.

Besides the Laptop Studio, Surface devices are generally designed for average use. That won't be the case with the Surface Laptop Ultra, as it will pack up to 128GB of unified memory. Microsoft also claims it can run AI models locally and that the chip delivers power comparable to a mobile RTX 5070 GPU.

If the Surface Laptop Ultra is everything Microsoft claims, it will easily be the most powerful Surface device yet — and could give the likes of the MacBook Pro stiff competition. Here’s everything you need to know about the Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra.

Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra: Design

The Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra will include some of the features you’d expect from a premium notebook. For starters, it has a 15-inch mini-LED PixelSense Ultra display that can reportedly reach 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness, making it the brightest display of any Surface device ever. Microsoft says it will have strong color accuracy for creative work.

You’ll also get a full set of ports, including HDMI, USB-C, USB-A, an SD card reader, and a headphone jack. The haptic touchpad is the largest Microsoft has ever used on a Surface, and the laptop is designed to run quietly even under load.

The Surface Laptop Ultra will reportedly have “all-day” battery life, which is a claim I’m eager to verify in our lab tests. Expect it to come in Platinum and Nightfall finishes.

Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra: Nvidia RTX Spark

The Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra announcement alone is noteworthy, but it’s even more interesting because it’s one of the first laptops to feature the Nvidia RTX Spark chip. In case you were wondering, yes, it’s the processor long known as the “N1X.” Different moniker aside, the chip should be a major boon for the Surface Laptop Ultra.

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Nvidia Spark specs
Architecture	TSMC’s 3nm process
CPU	Up to 20-core Grace CPU
GPU	Blackwell architecture with up to 6,144 CUDA cores
Memory	16GB-128GB Unified LPDDR5X with 300GB bandwidth
I/O support	USB4 and Thunderbolt
Power	Up to 80 watts TDP

The chip packs up to 6,144 Blackwell RTX cores, 20 efficient Arm CPU cores, and up to 128GB of unified memory. That adds up to 1 petaflop of AI performance, enough to run 120-billion-parameter models right on the laptop without choking. The claimed power of an RTX 5070 laptop GPU should mean smoother 3D rendering, faster video exports, and potentially higher-end gaming.

If all those numbers went over your head, it means the Surface Laptop Ultra should feel like a legitimate workstation you can carry around. We’d need to benchmark this laptop and live with it to see what it can do, but RTX Spark should give it some serious power.

Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra: Outlook

The Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra is set to launch later this year, so it might be a while until we can go hands-on with this machine. I’m certainly looking forward to that, but given how expensive electronics have become thanks to the RAM crisis, I’m not eager to see how much this thing will cost.

We’ll have more information on the Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra as soon as we hear it, so stay tuned!

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