Nvidia opened RTX Spark Windows laptop preorders on October 7, 2026, giving developers a portable way to run its AI software, according to its original announcement. The appeal is keeping models and data on your own computer, with Nvidia promising local use without per prompt cloud fees. Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra store page lists configurations for preorder.
At Microsoft’s San Francisco event, Jensen Huang sat down with Satya Nadella to discuss computers that can host AI agents, software that carries out tasks for users. “It is now your personal assistant,” Huang said of an agent running on a PC. That was the vision onstage; Nvidia’s product page makes the more practical pitch that developers can build and test models locally using CUDA, its software platform for running work on Nvidia chips.
Memory is the detail to check before ordering. Nvidia advertises up to 128GB of unified memory, a pool shared by the processor and graphics chip, for the RTX Spark N1X configuration with 20 CPU cores and 6,144 GPU cores; the N1X configuration with 18 CPU cores and 5,120 GPU cores supports up to 64GB. Those are supported ceilings, not the memory included in every laptop. That changes how much room you have for a local model, so the Spark name alone doesn’t tell you whether a particular laptop fits your work.
Microsoft actually offers the Surface Laptop Ultra with the smaller N1X configuration, 24GB of memory and 512GB of storage for $2,599.99, or the larger configuration with 128GB and 1TB for $5,899.99. Nvidia also names ASUS ProArt P16, Dell XPS 16, HP OmniBook Ultra 16, Lenovo Pro 9n and MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI+ laptops, but prices and installed memory for those models weren’t available in the Nvidia pages we could read. Independent testing by Tom’s Hardware on existing local AI desktops found that memory bandwidth affects how quickly models generate text, so fitting a model in memory doesn't establish how responsive it'll feel. A separate study of local models on Apple Silicon found that software choice and long prompts also affected performance; neither investigation establishes how these Windows laptops will perform.
Nvidia says laptop availability begins October 16, with compact desktops following in November. It also previewed DGX Station for Windows, a larger enterprise machine whose product page targets the fourth quarter. Those are announced schedules, and the workstation remains a forthcoming product.
Next comes delivery against Nvidia’s October 16 target and independent testing of the shipping laptops. Which memory configuration would you want tested with your own model and longest prompts before placing a preorder?
Since this story was published
Microsoft confirmed that RTX Spark Windows laptops will begin shipping October 16, including the Surface Laptop Ultra, in its October 7 announcement (Microsoft).
Sources
- 1.NVIDIA, Microsoft Kick Off a New Beginning for Windows PCs With RTX Spark and AI Agents · Nvidia
- 2.Slim Laptops & Small Desktops | NVIDIA RTX Spark · Nvidia
- 3.AI Supercomputer for Windows | NVIDIA DGX Station · Nvidia
- 5.Buy Surface Laptop Ultra: Price, Specs, Windows · Microsoft
- 6.Exploring Apple Silicon’s local AI performance with the Mac Studio and M4 Max · Tom’s Hardware
- 7.Production Grade Local LLM Inference on Apple Silicon: A Comparative Study of MLX, MLC LLM, Ollama, llama.cpp, and PyTorch MPS · arXiv
Reported by the WattsUpNext desk from the sources linked below. Spot an error? Tell us at corrections@wattsupnext.com.
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