During Microsoft’s keynote yesterday, the company actually announced another product alongside its Surface Laptop Ultra: the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box. It is essentially an AI workstation powered by the same NVIDIA RTX Spark SoC, just in a desktop form factor, and at an eye-watering price of US$5,999 (~RM24,546).
That’s about US$2,000 more expensive than it direct rival from AMD, the Ryzen AI Halo workstation that was announced back in May this year. Not only that, but the red team’s top spec configuration offers way more Unified Memory, 192GB, to be precise.
To run through the specs of the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, the compact workstation houses the RTX Spark N1X, a 20-core ARM CPU with 6,144 Blackwell CUDA cores. That chipset includes 128GB LPDDR5X Unified Memory, shared between CPU and GPU. And it comes with a 2TB PCIe 5.0 SSD that is removable and replaceable.
Unlike RTX Spark laptops, Microsoft says that its mini desktop form factor is designed for sustained workloads, with a 100W thermal envelope. Connectivity includes two USB-C ports, one 5Gbps USB-A port, an HDMI 2.1b, a LAN port, Wi-Fi 7, and a 165W PSU.
By comparison, AMD’s Ryzen AI Halo workstation is powered by AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395 or Max+ Pro 495, up to 192GB LPDDR5X-8000 Unified Memory, up to 2TB of PCIe 4.0 storage, a 120W TDP, and a starting US$3,999 (~RM16,539) price tag. To be precise, the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 SKU is the one that comes with 128GB LPDDR5X Unified Memory, while working models of the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 – Framework and Minisforum are two brands that recently announced devices with said APU – ship out with 192GB LPDDR5X Unified Memory, and for about the same price as the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box.
In terms of performance, the claimed AI model capacities are set at 120 billion parametres with the RTX Spark-powered device, while AMD’s Ryzen AI Halo workstation claims up to 300 billion parametres. Of course, the AI software is different for both platforms: NVIDIA uses CUDA and TensorRT, while AMD uses ROCm and Pytorch. Oh, and the red team’s product can run on both Windows 11 and Linux.
Preorders for the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box are already open, with the first batches expected to ship out by 24 November this year.
(Source: Microsoft, Videocardz)
