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Microsoft N1Xes Intel in favor of Nvidia's shiny new SoCs in Surface Laptop Ultra

What happened

Microsoft released its first Surface notebook powered by Nvidia's RTX Spark SoC (the N1X chip), the Surface Laptop Ultra, during an event in San Francisco on Wednesday. It is one of several new Copilot+ PCs aimed at 'builders,' available for preorder starting today and expected to begin shipping next week. It starts at $2,599 for the gray variant with the lower-end 18-core N1X, 24 GB of unified memory, and a 512 GB user-serviceable SSD; stepping up to the 20-core chip, 128 GB of memory, and 1 TB of storage costs $5,899. Microsoft also announced a mini PC style development kit based on the N1X priced at $5,999. The machine ships with either an 18- or 20-core CPU designed by MediaTek and Arm and an Nvidia Blackwell-based RTX GPU with between 5,120 and 6,144 cores, with up to 128 GB of memory. The source does not state any impact on supply or pricing.