Microsoft just ended its Windows and Surface event in San Francisco, and if there was one phrase the Redmond-based company wanted everyone to take away, it was hybrid intelligence<\/b>.<\/p>\n
The idea behind it is actually pretty simple: Microsoft does not think every AI task should be sent off to the cloud. Instead, it wants Windows PCs to decide when something can be handled locally (aka on-device), when it needs the cloud, and increasingly, when both should work together.<\/p>\n
At the centre of that push are Microsoft\u2019s new RTX Spark<\/b> systems, developed in partnership with NVIDIA. They provide the local AI horsepower behind Microsoft\u2019s hybrid intelligence strategy, while also giving the company a new platform to rethink what a high-performance Windows PC can be.<\/p>\n Microsoft also revealed there will be new Surface RTX Spark Dev Box PCs.<\/p>\n Photo: HWZ<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n The first and most obvious example of that is the new Surface Laptop Ultra<\/b>, Microsoft\u2019s high-performance flagship and its first notebook built around NVIDIA\u2019s RTX Spark platform. It uses a Grace-based CPU<\/b> paired with a Blackwell RTX GPU<\/b>, with configurations going up to 128GB of unified memory \u2013 enough to run AI models with more than 120 billion parameters locally. The machine isn\u2019t exactly an unknown either; we have already seen it first-hand at Computex in June (check out our video below), but it has now also been humorously revealed to have a magnetic USB-C charging system that works a little like Apple\u2019s MagSafe.<\/p>\nSurface Laptop Ultra is Microsoft\u2019s showcase for RTX Spark<\/h2>\n