New Delhi: Microsoft has officially introduced its latest Surface Laptop Ultra, a MacBook Pro competitor, which is powered by the NVIDIA RTX Spark. But along with this, Microsoft has also introduced the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box.
There is a 1 petaflop of compute, 128GB RAM, and it can run on 120 billion parameter models locally. RTX Spark combines a 20-core Grace GPU, 10x Cortex-X925 + 10x Cortex-A275, and a Blackwell GPU, which is the architecture behind the RTX 50 series of GPUs.
Surface RTX Spark Dev Box will ship with Windows 11 Pro, which has been pre-configured for developers. At first, users will also find that dark mode is on, popular dev tools are already installed, and PowerShell 7 is the default.
WSL 2 is configured with GPU passthrough and CUDA support. AI servers and a lot of AI tools are based on Linux, so this lets the users develop and test things locally. It has a monolithic aluminum body with 1,000 air vents, and a 3D printed body is designed to help with cooling.
It has an HDMI port, two USB-C, one USB-A, an Ethernet port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Users can configure it to handle agentic AI tasks or AI inference at the office while users connect to it remotely with a lower-power laptop.
This is billed as the development machine, but users wish that Microsoft would make a mass market version of this, a Windows Mac Studio of sorts.
