Microsoft is preparing its biggest Windows-focused event in more than two years, and it's bringing in some serious outside firepower. The company has confirmed a Windows and Surface event for October 7 in San Francisco, with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang joining Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Windows and Surface chief Pavan Davuluri on stage.
According to Microsoft's invitation teasers, the event will centre on "how local AI will shape the next chapter of the PC," starting at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. With Jensen Huang on stage, NVIDIA's RTX Spark platform will likely feature heavily in the discussion, tying together developments across Windows software, NVIDIA hardware, Surface devices, and the broader PC ecosystem.
Likely taking centre stage is the Surface Laptop Ultra, a high-performance machine Microsoft first teased earlier this year as its answer to the MacBook Pro. Beyond the design upgrade, the laptop's highlight is its custom NVIDIA RTX Spark SoC, which pairs a Blackwell GPU with up to 128GB of unified memory, up to one petaflop of AI compute, and native CUDA support. This allows it to run AI models with up to 120 billion parameters entirely locally. Microsoft still lists the laptop as a pre-release product, with final availability pending regulatory approval, and has not yet announced pricing.
- Read more: NVIDIA and Microsoft tease 'a new era of PC' ahead of Computex, and it's hard not to link this to the fabled N1X chip
- Read more: NVIDIA announces RTX Spark, a Windows on Arm superchip for laptops and compact PCs
- Read more: NVIDIA confirms the first RTX Spark laptops and when they will release
To support that hardware, Microsoft has spent this year refining the underlying Windows 11 software stack. That includes a specialised Workload Profile Scheduling system designed to distribute background tasks across the chip's 20 CPU cores, along with an optimised Prism emulation layer meant to keep legacy x86 applications running efficiently on ARM-based hardware.
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Beyond Microsoft's own Surface lineup, major hardware partners including Dell, Lenovo, and ASUS have already committed to building their own laptops around the RTX Spark platform. Microsoft's last major Windows event took place in May 2024 for the original Copilot+ PC launch, and the one before that dates back to the Windows 11 reveal in June 2021.
