Microsoft opens preorders for RTX Spark Surface Laptop Ultra and Dev Box

Microsoft frames the Surface Laptop Ultra as the result of a deep partnership with NVIDIA, saying Windows was optimized to draw out the full performance of RTX Spark and that the device was designed from scratch. That chip pairing is what lets the laptop carry up to a 6144-core NVIDIA Blackwell RTX GPU, up to a 20-core NVIDIA Grace CPU and up to 128GB of unified memory, which the company says is enough to run AI models with more than 120B parameters locally and reach up to 1 petaflop of AI performance.

The Dev Box takes the same RTX Spark foundation and targets developers specifically, shipping with tools such as Visual Studio Code, Git, GitHub CLI, GitHub Copilot, WSL, Python and Node preinstalled. The stated goal is to cut the time spent setting up an environment so more time goes into building, which suggests Microsoft is treating local large-model work as a developer-workflow problem rather than only a hardware one.

Beyond the chips, Microsoft is also changing hardware conventions: the Laptop Ultra uses a new thermal design delivering up to 2.5 times the thermal capacity of existing Surface Laptops, is under 18mm thin, and replaces Surface Connect with a magnetic USB Type-C system Microsoft calls Magnetic Connect, which it describes as a world first for a laptop. Whether these machines land with buyers beyond early adopters may hinge on the Dev Box's U.S.-only availability at launch and on the Laptop Ultra's Japan pricing, which starts at 513,480 yen.