Nvidia RTX Spark Laptops Will Start at $2,600, Launch October 16

Microsoft and Nvidia held a joint launch event on Wednesday for the new RTX Spark laptops, showcasing the new Surface Laptop Ultra design and several other models from key manufacturers. Promising to reinvent the PC with a new raft of AI features and capabilities, the new designs don't change much for consumers but seem promising as workstations and gaming devices.

Although Microsoft and Nvidia CEOs hosted the event, the debut of the RTX Spark laptop lineup included representatives from many top laptop brands, including Asus, Lenovo, HP, and Dell. All of them now have live preorders for the new laptop designs featuring RTX Spark chips, alongside Microsoft's new Surface Laptop Ultra.

The devices start at $2,600, with the Asus ProArt P14 sporting 24GB of memory, while the Surface Laptop Ultra with 48GB is listed at just under $4,000. Some models ship with up to 128GB of memory, with the ProArt P16 in that configuration currently priced at $7,000. HP and Dell offer similar configurations, with options from 24GB of RAM up to 128GB, priced anywhere from $3,000 to over $6,000.

In short, these are not cheap laptops. While Microsoft and Nvidia have spent a lot of time talking about how agentic AI PCs will reinvent the PC, these aren't laptops aimed at everyday consumers. Their built-in developer tools and ability to use the powerful GPU at the heart of the Spark chip are intriguing: More agentic AI capabilities in Windows could ease operation, open up more automation opportunities, and create a more natural-language operating system that could someday be really useful for everyday users.

But only when it filters down to more affordable devices. For now, the main releases are all workstation-grade and priced accordingly. They're for developers frustrated by token limits, and businesses balking at token costs. Microsoft and Nvidia claim these laptops, with their ability to run models with 10s of billions of parameters, could be enough.

That's hard to take at face value when Microsoft also pushes its Copilot cloud systems, likely with trillions of parameters (we don't know for sure since they're closed models), as the most capable models. But as many Chinese labs have shown, you can get a lot of useful intelligence from much smaller models. The question is whether the performance and capability dip is worth saving on tokens by spending thousands up front on a Spark laptop.

That's why Microsoft and Nvidia framed the launch as the start of a new "Hybrid Intelligence" era, where we use local AI for quick tasks and online AI for more complex ones. Good for protecting sensitive data and reducing reliance on cloud systems, but time will tell whether people want to mix and match or would rather opt for one or the other depending on their needs.

This article contains images from PCMag, a website owned and operated by ExtremeTech parent company Ziff Davis.

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