Microsoft opened preorders for the Surface Laptop Ultra on October 7, 2026. Microsoft’s U.S. product page lists a starting price of $2,599.99, and the company scheduled availability to begin October 16. The laptop uses NVIDIA RTX Spark, a platform built around a Grace Arm CPU and Blackwell RTX graphics.
NeoTeo previewed the October 7 Windows and AI event in earlier coverage. Microsoft’s promotional introduction presents the laptop as a portable system for demanding apps.
What NVIDIA RTX Spark brings to the laptop
Microsoft describes RTX Spark as combining an NVIDIA Grace Arm CPU with Blackwell RTX graphics. Its advertised maximum configuration reaches 20 CPU cores, 6,144 GPU cores and 128 GB of unified memory, which is shared by the CPU and GPU. The amount of memory addressable by the GPU is less than the system’s total memory and varies by configuration and workload. Microsoft’s announcement and U.S. product page describe the platform and its limits.
Microsoft also says the laptop can support local models with more than 120 billion parameters and advertises up to one petaflop of AI performance. That peak is a theoretical FP4 figure using sparsity, not a measured speed for running a particular model. FP4 is a low-precision format for representing numbers in AI computing; sparsity reduces the amount of computation by taking advantage of zero values.
The laptop has a 15-inch touchscreen with a 120 Hz refresh rate. Microsoft lists peak HDR brightness of up to 2,000 nits measured over a 10% display window; sustained and SDR brightness are lower.
Repairable storage and Windows on Arm
Microsoft says the SSD is user-removable, with storage configurations up to 2 TB, and that it will provide repair guides and replacement parts. Service options vary by market and over time. Microsoft’s product page describes those storage and repair provisions.
The laptop runs Windows on Arm, meaning its processor uses Arm architecture rather than the x86 architecture common in many Windows PCs. Some x86 apps can run through Prism, Microsoft’s emulation layer, but compatibility and performance vary by app. An app that works through emulation may not perform like a version built to run natively on Arm. Microsoft’s Windows on Arm documentation explains the distinction.
What early pre-release tests reported
A user’s reported tests of one pre-release unit ran on NVIDIA’s 616.00 developer preview driver. Results included a Cinebench 2024 multi-thread score of 1,386, 31 frames per second in Port Royal and about 22 frames per second in Steel Nomad. The user also reported gaming stutter, and Phoronix CUDA tests failed. These are early observations from a pre-release system and driver, not results from the retail configuration.
