Microsoft (MSFT) unveiled its Nvidia (NVDA)-powered Surface Laptop Ultra on Wednesday at an event in San Francisco, California.
Designed to compete with Apple’s (AAPL) MacBook Pro laptops for AI, video workloads, and gaming, the $2,599 Laptop Ultra is Microsoft’s most powerful Surface yet, thanks to its Arm (ARM)-based Nvidia RTX Spark processor.
Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft’s executive vice president for Windows and devices, said the chip offers up to 128 GB of unified memory, giving it the ability to run demanding AI models that other laptops can’t do.
According to Tom Mainelli, IDC group vice president of device and consumer research, the Surface Laptop Ultra will likely appeal to early adopters in the consumer and enterprise sectors.
“At the end of the day, cost is a big factor,” Mainelli told Yahoo Finance. “But you’ll also get to a point where you want to make decisions about what data will go to the cloud, what data will stay locally, and then you’ll think about the layers of orchestration.”
Orchestration is the process of determining which AI models and agents to use, when and for what purpose. For example, you wouldn’t want to use an expensive cloud-based model like OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra to perform a task that a free local model installed on your PC can handle.
At Wednesday’s event, Microsoft’s executive vice president for Windows and devices explained that the company is bringing hybrid AI capabilities and AI agent security to Windows through a series of updates.
The enterprise and consumer technology industries have relied heavily on local AI models as an alternative to cloud-based models and agents. Launching a new arms race in laptops and desktops.
Learn more: Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft keep the stock market afloat
529.76 +0.46 (+0.09%)
At close: 4:00:01 p.m. EDT
MSFT NVDA
Microsoft demonstrated the Surface Laptop Ultra’s performance in a video clip showing it running the video game “Gears of War: E Day”, GitHub Copilot and video editing platform DaVinci Resolve at the same time, something that would chew through a standard laptop.
When it comes to AI specifically, Microsoft says the Surface Laptop Ultra offers 4.3x faster AI image generation than a MacBook Pro with Apple’s M5 Pro chip and 6.2x faster video generation.
The computer industry, like the rest of the technology sector, faces a persistent shortage of memory and storage chips. This forced companies to increase the prices of their devices, thereby reducing overall sales.
But so far, that price increase has helped protect device makers from the worst of the sales declines.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
Click here for the latest technology news that will impact the stock market
Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance
Gn tech
