The Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra arrives with Nvidia’s RTX Spark on board

Laptops with ARM-based CPUs on board have become a common sight in Expert Reviews over the past couple of years, but today’s unveiling of the Microsoft Surface Ultra means they’re likely to become even more prevalent over the next few years.

That’s because Microsoft’s new MacBook Pro rival is powered by Nvidia’s new RTX Spark processor, a chip designed to run Windows PCs, and Microsoft is promising this is the most powerful laptop the company has ever made.

There’s no final specification or prices available just yet, but we do know that this is going to be a laptop with workstation-class performance, a large 15in mini-LED touchscreen with a pixel density of 262ppi, the largest haptic touchpad ever on a Surface laptop and plenty of ports and connectivity.

Alongside three USB-C ports of unspecified denomination, there’s a USB-A port, an SD-card slot, a 3.5mm headphone jack and an HDMI output.

It’s a laptop, according to a Microsoft blog post, that has been designed “for those building the systems, the breakthroughs and the infrastructure the world runs on and gets changed by”.

The RTX Spark combines all the power of an Nvidia Blackwell GPU with up to 128GB of unified memory. That’s graphics performance equivalent to an RTX 5070 and up to 1 petaflop of AI compute.

Microsoft also claims the efficiency of the new chip delivers the sort of all-day battery life we’ve become used to from machines based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors of late.

It’s not the first time Microsoft has partnered with Nvidia, of course. When the Surface range first emerged 14 years ago (way back in 2012), the Surface RT came with a 1.4GHz Nvidia Tegra 3. It was designed as a lightweight computing device, a world away from the powerhouse workstation Microsoft is envisaging the Surface Laptop Ultra to be.

The Surface RT was a failure, mainly due to the limitations of Windows at that time. But in 2026 Windows 11 has more robust support for ARM, and laptops based on ARM chips – mostly Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X and X2 series so far, have been far more successful as a result.

The Microsoft Surface Laptop will be released in Autumn 2026, almost certainly in the US first, before coming to UK shores later in the yea. It’s going to be joined by an army of other machines based on this latest Nvidia chip, with the GPU giant announcing partnerships with Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and MSI in addition to the Surface Laptop Ultra.

One thing is certain: it’s going to be an interesting time in the laptop world over the course of the next few months. Watch this space for full reviews of the new wave of mobile PCs.

Written By

Jonathan Bray

Head of reviews at Expert Reviews, Jon has been testing and writing about products since before most of you were born (well, only if you were born after 1996). In that time he’s tested and reviewed hundreds of laptops, PCs, smartphones, vacuum cleaners, coffee machines, doorbells, cameras and more. He’s worked on websites since the early days of tech, writing game reviews for AOL and hardware reviews for PC Pro, Computer Buyer and other print publications. He’s also had work published in Trusted Reviews, Computing Which? and The Observer. And yet, even after so many years in the industry, there’s still nothing more he loves than getting to grips with a new product and putting it through its paces.

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