Microsoft unveiled the Surface Laptop Ultra, a MacBook Pro competitor powered by Nvidia RTX Spark. What if you had everything except a laptop? Meet the Surface RTX Spark Dave Box.
The pitch is short but sweet: 1 petaflop of compute, 128GB of RAM, can run 120 billion parameter models locally. To add a little more detail, it is 1 petaflop of FP4 with sparse matrices and the RAM is integrated so it is shared between the CPU and GPU.
Speaking of which, the RTX Spark adds a 20 core Grace CPU (10x Cortex-X925 + 10x Cortex-A725) and a Blackwell GPU, which is the architecture behind the RTX 50 series of GPUs. This is reportedly on par with the RTX 5070 with 6,144 CUDA cores. Of course, you’ll never find a consumer RTX card with that much VRAM, which is the entire point of this chip.
The Microsoft Surface RTX Spark Dev Box will come with Windows 11 Pro pre-configured for developers – on first startup, you’ll find that dark mode is turned on, popular dev tools are pre-installed and PowerShell 7 is the default.
Interestingly, WSL 2 is configured with GPU passthrough and CUDA support. Microsoft doesn’t say it out loud, but the “L” in “WSL” stands for “Linux.” Actually, AI servers and a lot of AI tools are based on Linux, so it lets you develop and test things locally.
Microsoft says the box has a monolithic aluminum body with 1,000 air vents, “indicative of its 1,000 teraflops of compute performance.” This 3D printed body is designed to help with cooling, although this is not enough for passive cooling – the system can dissipate up to 100W.
And that’s why the RTX Spark dev box makes sense – the Surface Laptop Ultra has the same RTX Spark chip and, in theory, could offer similar performance. However, the realities of cooling and battery capacity in the laptop form factor limit sustained performance.
You can use the box as your main development machine – it’s got one HDMI port, two USB-C, one USB-A, an Ethernet port, and a 3.5mm jack. Or you can configure it to handle agentic AI tasks or AI inference in the office when you connect to it remotely from a low-powered laptop.
The Microsoft Surface RTX dev box has one HDMI port, 2x USB-C, 1x USB-A, Ethernet, and a 3.5mm jack.
It’s pitched as a development machine, but we wish Microsoft would make a mass-market version of it – a sort of Windows Mac Studio.
Anyway, the Microsoft Surface RTX Spark Dev Box will be available later this year – in the US, it will be sold exclusively on Microsoft.com. We don’t know if other regions will get the Dave Box or how much it will cost. Microsoft also hasn’t set a price for the Surface Laptop Ultra, but it should be cheaper since it lacks a laptop’s screen and battery.