Surface Laptop Ultra Outruns Microsoft's Own AI Software, Ars Technica Finds

The $2,599.99 Nvidia laptop runs huge AI models; Microsoft says full Copilot+ support waits until late 2026 or early 2027.

Microsoft's new Surface Laptop Ultra ran a 70-billion-parameter AI model to recap the plot of "Wayne's World," its fans spinning at 100 percent, Ars Technica reported Friday.

The 15-inch laptop is built on Nvidia's new RTX Spark chip and starts at $2,599.99 on Microsoft's own store page, and Windows Central reported that shipments were expected to begin Friday. Ars Technica's verdict is that the hardware does most of what Microsoft promised, while a lot of the software, Microsoft's included, hasn't caught up.

The trick is memory. The Spark puts an Arm processor and Nvidia's Blackwell graphics on one chip that draw from a single shared pool, so the graphics side can borrow a big share of it. In one game test, Ars saw the 64-gigabyte model make nearly three-quarters of its memory available to graphics.

That's how a 43-gigabyte AI model, which Ars said probably wouldn't fit on any laptop's separate graphics chip, turned out 6.26 tokens, or chunks of text, a second. It's slow, and it works. Microsoft's page goes further, pitching local AI agents built on models of up to 120 billion parameters.

The target buyer is somebody who'd otherwise buy a MacBook Pro, or as Microsoft put it to reviewers, "a high performance audience," according to Ars. The store page is blunter, with a banner that reads "Break up with your MacBook and get up to $1,000."

But Nvidia's graphics chip sat out much of Ars's testing. AI Dev Gallery, a preview app Microsoft suggested reviewers use, ran its chat models on the processor alone, and it froze and crashed twice. Microsoft's own steps for running a model on Nvidia's CUDA software failed when a needed package didn't seem to exist for this setup, and HandBrake, the video converter, couldn't find Nvidia's encoder at all.

Then there's the label on the box. Copilot+ has usually meant a dedicated AI chip, called an NPU, rated at 40 trillion operations a second or more. The N1X chip doesn't have one, and Ars reported that Microsoft is extending the label on the strength of the graphics chip instead.

Microsoft told reviewers that full Copilot+ software "won't arrive until late 2026 or early 2027," Ars reported. Until then, features like Recall and Click to Do aren't there, and the Copilot key opens the Microsoft 365 assistant.

The cheapest version has 24GB of memory and Windows 11 Home. Ars tested the $4,299.99 model with 64GB, and the top configuration, with 128GB, costs $5,899.99, Notebookcheck reported. When someone at Microsoft's briefing asked what the base model was good for, the answer was that it's "useful for smaller models locally," Ars reported.

And that "Wayne's World" run didn't happen in Microsoft's app. The reviewer turned to Ollama, a tool that runs models from the command line, after AI Dev Gallery proved frustrating, then said it was the kind of demo Microsoft ought to be showing off.

Source: arstechnica.com, retrieved October 16, 2026. Other sources: microsoft.com, windowscentral.com, notebookcheck.net.