Microsoft announces Surface RTX Spark AI supercomputer development box
Microsoft Corp. today announced it’s bringing agentic development capabilities into the hands of developers with a new desktop form factor supercomputer called the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box.
Developed with Nvidia Corp.’s newly announced RTX Spark processor under the hood, it’s capable of delivering up to 1 petaflop of AI compute with 128 gigabytes of unified memory and run up to 120 billion-parameter models. — as long as they’re crunched down to 4-bit quantization, a type of compression that allows larger models to run on tighter hardware.
As a Windows box, it’s capable of running them on Microsoft’s Linux virtualization WSL 2 with native graphics processing unit passthrough with full CUDA support preconfigured for developers with Visual Studio Code, GitHub Copilot and other tools preinstalled.
The company said it would become available later this year in the United States.
