Microsoft and Nvidia Unveil Surface Laptop Ultra For $2,599 (neowin.net)
- Reference: 0186061666
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/10/07/1812223/microsoft-and-nvidia-unveil-surface-laptop-ultra-for-2599
- Source link: https://www.neowin.net/news/microsofts-surface-laptop-ultra-is-now-available-for-pre-order-for-2599/
> To keep the device's temperature under control, Microsoft has also developed a new cooling system that offers up to 2.5 times the thermal capacity of the 15-inch Surface Laptop 7th Edition. The Surface Laptop Ultra comes with a 15-inch PixelSense Ultra mini-LED touchscreen with a 3:2 aspect ratio, a pixel density of 262 PPI, and peak HDR brightness of up to 2,000 nits.
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> Despite its beefy specs, the Surface Laptop Ultra measures less than 18mm thick and weighs under 4.5 pounds (around 2kg). The laptop will be available in Platinum and Nightfall finishes. Microsoft has also increased the size of the precision haptic touchpad by more than 30% compared to the Surface Laptop 7th Edition for improved haptic input. The Surface Laptop Ultra includes a broader selection of ports, featuring USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a full-size SD card reader. It also features the world's first built-in USB-C magnetic charging.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-laptop-ultra
[2] https://www.neowin.net/news/microsofts-surface-laptop-ultra-is-now-available-for-pre-order-for-2599/
Aaaaand.... (Score:3)
It's already out of stock
Alsoooo... (Score:1)
> It's already out of stock
That is sometimes an intentionally engineered situation used to garner more attention and manufacture confidence.
You really need to know how many units were manufactured. If only enough for some fraction of early adopters, its not so meaningful to run out.
finally (Score:2)
my windows update patching can happen in mere hours.
heat your apartment (Score:2)
You are going to be able to heat your house with this, just in time for the next massive heatwave.
Re: (Score:2)
At 80W TDP for a fully loaded RTX Spark (which this may not be, they didn't specify which Spark they are using) you're not going to be heating much more than your lap.
Laptop cooling pad ... (Score:1)
> At 80W TDP for a fully loaded RTX Spark (which this may not be, they didn't specify which Spark they are using) you're not going to be heating much more than your lap.
A laptop cooling pad is a great investment for such a machine.
Re: (Score:2)
maybe just a room, unlesss your house is a caardboard box like me.
$2600? (Score:1)
$5900 for 128GB
Windows-only Aarch64 stuff. Nova Lake is almost here anyhow. If I spend that much, I want more than a overheating windows laptop.
apx architecture really needs new binaries (Score:1)
> $5900 for 128GB
> Windows-only Aarch64 stuff. Nova Lake is almost here anyhow. If I spend that much, I want more than a overheating windows laptop.
Nova Lake needs recompiled software to truly realize its performance. The apx architecture is backwards compatible to x86_64 but software needs to be rebuilt to apx specifically to access new registers, new instructions, etc and get all the performance benefits.
Magnetic USB-C charging! (Score:2)
That's awesome! The specs listed on the MS site don't mention a special USB-C port , just a special charger--I wonder if that charger would work with other USB-C-powered devices.
Repairability (Score:2)
Are these more repairable than the tablet style ones? Thin form factors are ok if they're cheap like a tablet, but spending so much on something disposable is less sensible.
Microsoft hardware (Score:2)
The only Microsoft hardware I've ever been impressed with was their mouse. Now that Microsoft is a full-on spyware company I can't imagine ever wanting to own one of these laptops.
Z-80 coprocessor card (Score:1)
> The only Microsoft hardware I've ever been impressed with was their mouse.
The Z-80 coprocessor card for the Apple II was pretty good. :-)
I tire of your jokes involving petaflops (Score:2)
How many Beowolf clusters is that?
This is AI in 2026, son. Show your work in gigawatts of compute or GTFO.
Mandelbrot rendering it is (Score:1)
> I tire of your jokes involving petaflops
Well then, Mandelbrot rendering it is ... :-)
No mention of battery life (Score:3)
that's like the most important feature of a portable computer
Re: (Score:2)
comes with a really long cable
Re: (Score:2)
I dunno how efficient these processors are these days but I'm guessing a petaflop of calculations lets you watch the battery percentage bar go down like a melting ice cream cone on a hot July day
"Portables" may not be battery powered (Score:1)
> that's like the most important feature of a portable computer
Portables may not be battery powered, they may use a wall outlet. For example one can get a case for a Mac mini M4 or M6 or an Intel / ASUS NUC and move it from a desk at home to a desk at the office and back again. That too is a portable computer. Its a laptop computer that is battery powered. "Portable" goes back to suitcase sized IBM PCs affectionately referred to as "luggable" by users, and the original 1984 Mac.
"Magnetic charging'? (Score:2)
So they're violating Apple's MagSafe patent?
Does it have a Thunderbolt 5 port?
Fatal flaw (Score:2)
It runs a modern Windows OS.
Re: (Score:2)
Not only that, but the base model, which sells for a mouth watering $2599, comes with the powerful "Home Edition".
Desktop version? please? (Score:2)
Dump the screen, keyboard, ridiculous cooling solution, use standard sized components - and it's a desktop! which should be relatively affordable to the laptop version.
With no battery and no thermal throttling after 30 seconds, it sounds like a no-brainer. Oh wait, but it's 2026...
poor benchmark (Score:2)
I selected NVIDIA RTX Spark N1X (6144-core GPU, 20-core ) and the price with 64 GB + 2 TB went to $4700.
Then I did Apple M5 Max 64 GB + 2 TB. It was $5400
Benchmark: Apple 58000 vs 39000 on cpubenchmark site (multi-core). Even more percentage difference for single core. I would rather pay 17% more and get 50% more performance.
Only Windows lovers will buy this.
Scant details in the article (Score:2)
2.5X the thermal is likely a drop in the proverbial ocean. Probably needs more like 50X the cooling of a typical laptop to take full advantage of the processor. But then the battery would be exhausted in 20 minutes. I'd also expect the case to get very hot if they really open it open. Perhaps a new way to burn your fingerprints off by typing?
Re: (Score:2)
I, too, find it rather strange to build such a thing as a laptop rather than into a larger housing, given how extremely dependent the "large AI model" use-case is on being able to run at full power for extended periods of time.
Re: (Score:2)
Its honestly just fine. I'm actively replying using the MacBook Pro M5 MAX 128GB. When doing "AI" tasks, the bottleneck is memory performance, not compute. So yeah, the fans kick in because the system heats up, but it doesn't get to the point of thermal throttling. I imagine the Nvidia based laptops doing "AI" tasks will work about the same.
Re: (Score:2)
Using an M4 Pro for local AI, and the thermals register regularly at 99-100C under load. It never goes above, which means it's thermal throttling. You can confirm with all-smi installed from Homebrew.
Re: (Score:2)
Again, this Blackwell GPU is not the kind of Blackwell GPU meant to go into a data center (or even a large desktop workstation), much like not all RTX 50-series GPUs have the same cluster config or TDP. This is a chip intended for LLM models that run locally on a laptop. Now, don't ask what people are doing with local LLMs, but the Mac Studio is selling very well to the local LLM crowd, so there is a market for them, and it's reasonable to assume that some of that crowd will want a machine that is mobile.
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure if you know what this is, but an RTX Spark is at the high end of a low power ARM core. It has a TDP not dissimilar than any other workstation laptop crossover CPU ranging from 45W to 80W depending on which Spark this includes.
Worth nothing literally every laptop CPU is thermally limited. Heck these days most desktop CPUs are as well. 2.5x the thermal performance likely means well above 2.5x performance boost over the previous gen (which wasn't an efficient ARM chip).
Re:Scant details in the article (Score:4, Informative)
Am well aware. I'm also well aware my newer thinner laptop throttles way sooner than my old one. The faster processor on it is literally not just useless, and performs worse than my old slower one because it throttles within a couple seconds. That one petaflop spec is going to last a tenths of a second I expect. I did see another article since my post from a different source and it was touting the cloud access the new machine gets and how a few tasks could be run locally. So I'd expect that this is just a terminal into the cloud in reality. Run the task in the cloud, it'll be fast. Assuming you have a fast connection. Run it local and have dinner, a good nights sleep and it might be ready in the morning. Bonus, fry your eggs on it.
Re: (Score:2)
> That one petaflop spec is going to last a tenths of a second I expect.
You can't know that yet. Yes, this obsession with thinness is unhealthy, but you don't know how aggressively the fans are programmed to ramp up and whether a liquid metal thermal interface was used or not. Some OEMs can get surprising thermals out of thin laptops using aggressive fan curves and liquid metal (at the expense of the liquid metal sometimes leaking onto the board and amalgamating with the solder joints).
Also, all modern ch
Re: (Score:2)
Just because it's a Blackwell-architecture GPU, it doesn't mean it's the same chip as the Blackwell-architecture GPUs that go into data centers. GPUs are highly parallel, so they can scale TDP-wise depending on how many clusters of unified shaders you have and the clocks you run them at. This is not new, for example, the Maxwell architecture had chips ranging from 30W TDP (GeForce 830M and 930M) to 250W beasts like the GeForce GTX TITAN X.