Microsoft has announced a new laptop. And it might actually be good this time around. From the looks of it, they’re steering clear of anything fancy, which means no weird hinges and no removable screens. Instead, the Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra is just a sleek-looking laptop with powerful specs that might be enough to make it a proper MacBook Pro competitor.
The most powerful Surface laptop ever, it’s built on an Nvidia RTX Spark chip, so you get a powerful CPU and GPU combo to power through all your modern AI tasks. Of course, it can also power through your more pedestrian productivity and gaming needs. Hopefully, though, it’s not bloated with tons of questionably useful Microsoft software you’ll have to uninstall or turn off (it probably will be).
The Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra is a 15-inch laptop with a mini-LED PixelSense Ultra touchscreen that offers up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness. It will come in different configurations, so resolution will vary based on the specs you get, but this should make for an incredible-looking screen that’s plenty usable even in direct sunlight. The keyboard looks plenty standard for modern laptops, although the trackpad is massive. According to the outfit, it’s the biggest they’ve ever put on a Surface laptop. Naturally, it supports Windows 11’s haptic signals system for tactile feedback when you interact with certain features and apps.
Under the hood, it supposedly runs the same “superchip” used in Nvidia’s DGX Spark PCs, albeit one that, they claim, is optimized to work with Windows 11. That means, it should have the same 20 Arm CPU cores, 6,144 Blackwell GPU cores, and up to 128GB of unified memory. According to Microsoft, though, it will be sold as regular laptop, so RAM can be as low as 16GB, depending on the configuration you’re getting. Still, having the option to max out RAM to 128GB on a laptop sounds glorious. Nvidia claims the graphic performance should be on par with RTX 5070 laptop GPUs, so it should be good, but not quite top-end, as far as gaming hardware goes.
The Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra is capable of running large AI models if you max out the configuration, with the outfit claiming it delivers one petaflop of AI compute, allowing it to run up to 120B parameter models locally. Granted, it’s going to use up a lot of power and heat up a lot, but you can do a bunch of AI work locally, sparing you from having to min-max your token usage the way you do with online AI services. Oh yeah, early hands-on reviews say it gets really loud when the fans are on full blast (it also has the largest fans on any Surface laptop), which makes sense if you’re going to be crazy enough to run 120B parameter LLMs on a laptop. It’s also pretty generous with the ports, with USB-C, USB-A, SD card, and audio jack, so you get most of what you need to make the most of your laptop accessories.
The Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra is scheduled to come out in the fall. No exact configurations or pricing have been announced yet.
