By Monica Chin
Publication Date: 2026-10-06 16:30:00
At this point, the writing has been on the wall for Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra for some time. The company has been parading the thing around all summer, heralding its AI capabilities and demonstrating its capacity to chew through demanding games with admirable ease. We’ve known since Computex that the Ultra would be among a whole laundry list of laptops rolling out this year powered by Nvidia’s new RTX Spark, an Apple-style superchip that staples a CPU, GPU, and unified memory together. And that, along with Microsoft’s not-at-all-subtle marketing, made it fairly evident that the Surface Laptop Ultra was being positioned as an AI machine.
Here’s where things get interesting. The RTX Spark platform has two variants: one with 18 cores and one with 20. We predicted back at IFA that many laptops would contain the 18-core chip, given that that’s, you know, the one that seems more evidently useful for laptops and that Nvidia was demoing the 20-core…