Microsoft has been looking for a convincing answer for a long time to a question that the PC has been dragging on for years: whether Windows on ARM can be something more than autonomy, silence and light productivity. He Surface Laptop Ultra It is born precisely there. The company describes it as its most powerful Surface Laptop yet and ties it to more ambitious workloads, from creation to local AI, leaning on NVIDIA RTX Spark as a great novelty.
Microsoft’s move comes after a move that did not go unnoticed. Apple announced in 2020 the transition from the Mac to Apple silicon and materialized it that same year with the M1the company’s first own chip for its computers. With it, performance per watt, unified memory and vertical integration became an advantage that was difficult to ignore. That pressure no longer comes only from the high range. He MacBook Neowith a starting price of 699 euros, came to compete with affordable Chromebooks and Windows laptops.
In parallel, Microsoft has tried to organize its own response with the Copilot+ PCa more solid category than its previous attempts with ARMbut still far from becoming a bet that has paid off in popularity and, consequently, in market share.
A laptop to demonstrate an idea: Windows on ARM wants to go beyond autonomy
The file that Microsoft has advanced It has two layers. The first is in performance: NVIDIA Blackwell RTX GPU, up to 128 GB of unified memory, CUDA and 1 petaflop of AI compute (based on theoretical FP4 TOPS with sparsity). The second is in everything you see and touch: a touch screen mini-LED 15-inch PixelSense Ultra, up to 2,000 nits of brightness HDR maximum, 262 pixels per inch and the largest haptic touchpad that Microsoft has included in a Surface. There is also something almost surprising in 2026: HDMI, USB-C, USB-A, SD and headphone ports without depending on adapters.
When Microsoft talks about unified memory it doesn’t mean putting a lot of RAM in a laptop. The important thing is that this memory can serve as a common room for CPU and GPUso that the workloads are distributed according to what each task needs, although it eliminates the possibility of later extensions.
The other half of the announcement is in what has not yet appeared. Microsoft has not detailed the price, the exact launch date, the final configurations, the specific processor, the exact GPU or the autonomy expressed in hours. One detail: the company itself remembers in the fine print that the Surface Laptop Ultra is a preliminary product, that its characteristics may change and that the sale will depend on the certifications or regulatory approvals of each country or region.
Microsoft doesn’t get to this point from scratch either. The Copilot+ PCs of 2024 had already served to organize a new stage of Windows on ARM, with processors capable of surpassing the 40 TOPS of NPUlocal AI functions and equipment from partners such as Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung, in addition to the Surface themselves. However, the available data invites us to put the growth in context. The Registerciting Context, placed Copilot+ PCs at only 9% of AI PCs distributed in Europe in the second quarter of 2025. The figure showed progress, but also a still small base.
That’s where NVIDIA changes the type of conversation. The first wave of Windows on ARM relied heavily on efficiency, NPU and autonomy, but the Surface Laptop Ultra wants to add an ingredient that was missing from that story: graphical muscle and compatibility with a well-established professional ecosystem. CUDA It is not a minor word for anyone who works with AI, rendering or professional software supported by the NVIDIA ecosystem, because it has been part of many workflows for years. Microsoft is also introducing optimized Prism, native creative app support for ARM, and agreements with partners in gaming and anti-cheat systems.
What we have before us seems like a very interesting proposal. The announcement invites us to take it seriously, because the Redmond firm has made its position quite clear: it wants this Surface to be proof that this new stage of Windows on ARM can go much further. But it is still incomplete to pass sentence.to. We’ll have to get our hands on it to see how it performs, how it behaves and how it works in real life.
Images | Microsoft
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