- Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599, is available for preorder, and ships Oct. 16, per Pavan Davuluri, executive vice president of Windows and devices.
- The laptop carries an Nvidia AI chip with up to 128 GB of unified memory and up to one petaflop of compute, letting users run large AI models locally without cloud bills.
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at the launch event that the machine has as much computing power as Nvidia's 2016 DGX-1 data center server, which cost $250 million.
- Windows 11 routes AI coding requests between the local GPU and the cloud, and confines coding agents to Microsoft Execution Containers to block unwanted system access.
- Meta will introduce a version of its Muse AI agent for Windows, extending the agent that has topped Apple's App Store ahead of ChatGPT.
- Microsoft is not among the top six PC vendors by unit shipments, per Gartner, and the device push follows the 2024 Copilot+ PC standard that required neural processing units.
Quotes
“Microsoft might get me back to Windows”
“I think today is the day we'll start talking and thinking about the frontier ecosystem taking maybe slightly different contours two years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now”
“That classic edge that distributed computing will always remain distributed will be more true.”