In its first live event in two years, Microsoft today announced its newest Surface laptop, outlined a number of changes coming to Windows 11, and shared a vision for how local AI and agent workflows could reshape personal computing for those in the developer community as well as at-home enthusiasts.
Ultra Surface Laptop
Originally unveiled in May 2026, the new Surface Laptop Ultra will be Microsoft’s first offering to take advantage of the new Nvidia RTX Spark SoC (system on a chip). The device starts at $2,599 and comes in various memory and SoC configurations, with a 5,120- or 6,144-core Blackwell GPU and up to 128GB of LPDDR5x unified memory. It will begin shipping on October 16 and is now available for pre-order.
While the new Ultra is clearly focused on developers, graphics performance was highlighted during the presentation to show how capable the laptop can be. By relying on unified memory allocation instead of the physical VRAM limits of a traditional GPU, the laptop can allocate its resources to handle modern gaming tasks as well as local AI development and deployment. the new Gears of War: E-Day was shown running on the system, meaning that even without a traditional gaming GPU, AAA titles are on the table.
RTX Spark development box
Joined on stage by Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Windows and Devices President Pavan Davuluri also unveiled the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box. It is a $5,999 anodized aluminum black box “designed to meet the needs of cutting-edge developers.” The Spark Dev Box ships with a custom “developer-optimized” version of Windows 11 preconfigured for AI development and local AI use. With 128GB of unified memory and the integrated Nvidia RTX GPU, the box claims one petaflop (i.e. 1000 teraflops) of AI computing performance.
