A major new Microsoft product that has not yet been officially released has been leaked. According to Fouquin, a senior user of the well-known hardware forum TechPowerUp, he recently conducted an in-depth review of the unreleased Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra in a post. This new notebook is equipped with NVIDIA RTX Spark Arm architecture SoC chip. Faced with doubts from netizens about the channel through which they obtained the engineering prototype, the user claimed that he had picked up the machine that was treated as garbage on the roadside. However, forum netizens generally believed that this was just a joke because they did not want to reveal the source of the leak.
According to the evaluation information, the engineering machine is equipped with the top-of-the-line RTX Spark SoC, with 20 CPU cores and 6144 GPU cores. In initial testing, the device was only running an early version of the graphics driver, but after updating to the NVIDIA 616.00 preview driver, the built-in Blackwell GPU successfully turned on CUDA support.
In specific benchmark tests, under the 80W PL1 power consumption limit (performance mode), the notebook's CPU multi-core score in Cinebench 2024 was 1386 points and the single-core score was 123 points; in Cinebench 2026, the CPU multi-core and single-core scores were 5771 points and 540 points respectively. Overall, its CPU performance is still inferior to Apple's latest M5 Pro chip and some x86 platforms.
In addition to performance, the engineering machine also exposed many flaws of the early prototype in terms of power consumption, heat dissipation and stability. After the new driver was installed, the standby power consumption of the machine increased significantly. The standby power consumption in balanced mode increased from the original 7-8W to 12W, and in performance mode it reached 23W. In the AI performance of the Phoronix test suite, there was no obvious difference between different power modes. In addition, during the test, the device also experienced software failures that regularly crashed every hour or so of operation.
In terms of heat dissipation and power consumption control, the CPU core's power consumption can reach up to 38W in the balanced and optimal power efficiency modes, and the fan will start delayed until the core temperature reaches 98-100°C; in performance mode, the core power consumption increases to 44-50W, and the frequency is maintained at around 2.8GHz. In comparison, Blackwell GPU's heat dissipation performance is slightly better, with a peak temperature of around 90°C and an operating frequency generally maintained at 1550-1950MHz.
What is worthy of recognition is that this Windows-on-Arm notebook achieves consistency in GPU performance when powered by battery and plugged in, achieving an experience on par with Apple's MacBook. Reviewers also pointed out that the workmanship and industrial design of this model are quite excellent, the keyboard feels solid, and it is equipped with practical functions such as automatically extinguishing the backlight when people leave, and automatically waking up through the camera when people come.