Microsoft unveils the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box: a desktop RTX Spark-powered computer

Microsoft unveiled the Surface Laptop Ultra, a MacBook Pro competitor powered by the Nvidia RTX Spark. What if you could have that but minus the laptop? Meet the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box.

The pitch is short but sweet: 1 petaflop of compute, 128GB of RAM, can run 120 billion parameter models locally. To add a bit more detail, that is 1 petaflop of FP4 with sparse matrices and the RAM is unified so it is shared between the CPU and the GPU.

Speaking of which, the RTX Spark combines a 20 core Grace CPU (10x Cortex-X925 + 10x Cortex-A725) and a Blackwell GPU, which is the architecture behind the RTX 50 series of GPUs. This is reportedly equivalent to an RTX 5070 with its 6,144 CUDA cores. Of course, you’ll never find a consumer RTX card with this much VRAM, which is the whole point of this chip.

The Microsoft Surface RTX Spark Dev Box will ship with Windows 11 Pro that has been pre-configured for developers – at first startup, you will find that dark mode is on, popular dev tools are already installed and PowerShell 7 is the default.

Interestingly, WSL 2 is configured with GPU passthrough and CUDA support. Microsoft doesn’t say it out loud, but the “L” in “WSL” stands for “Linux”. Indeed, AI servers and a lot of AI tools are based on Linux, so this lets you develop and test things locally.

The Box has a monolithic aluminum body with 1,000 air vents, “a nod to its 1,000 teraflops of compute performance,” says Microsoft. This 3D printed body is designed to help with cooling, though this isn’t enough for passive cooling – the system can dissipate up to 100W.

And that’s why the RTX Spark Dev Box makes sense – the Surface Laptop Ultra has the same RTX Spark chip and, in theory, can offer the same performance. However, the realities of cooling and battery capacity possible in a laptop form factor limit sustained performance.

You can use the Box as your main development machine – it has an HDMI port, two USB-C, one USB-A, an Ethernet port and a 3.5mm jack. Or you can configure it to handle agentic AI tasks or AI inference at the office while you connect to it remotely with a lower power laptop.

This is billed as a development machine, but we wish that Microsoft would make a mass market version of this – a Windows Mac Studio of sorts.

Anyway, the Microsoft Surface RTX Spark Dev Box will be available later this year – in the US, it will be sold exclusively on Microsoft.com. We don’t know if and what other regions will get the Dev Box or how much it will cost. Microsoft hasn’t priced the Surface Laptop Ultra either, but this should be cheaper since it lacks the screen and battery of the laptop.

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