Microsoft’s Surface RTX Dev Box is a mini PC made for AI developers

A lot of PC makers are planning to launch laptop and desktop computers powered by NVIDIA’s RTX Spark processor later this year, including Microsoft, which introduced the upcoming Surface Laptop Ultra alongside NVIDIA’s announcement of its new chip for Windows PCs.

But Microsoft also plans to launch an RTX Spark-powered mini PC aimed at AI developers. It’s called the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, and in addition to featuring NVIDIA’s powerful processor with up to a petaflop of local AI processing performance, it also has a pretty interesting design.

The mini PC has “an anodized aluminum 3D printed body with 1,000 air vents built into its grid chassis,” and an unusual design that basically consists of a flat rectangle resting atop a narrower base. Microsoft says this helps dissipate up to 100 watts of heat – the company hasn’t provided detailed specs yet, but it appears there’s also a fan inside to aid with cooling.

What we do know is that there’s an Ethernet port and USB Type-A port on the bottom, and two USB Type-C ports, an HDMI port, and a headphone jack on top.

And under the hood there’s NVIDIA’s RTX Spark processor combines a 20-core Arm-based processor with a high-performance GPU with 6044 CUDA cores and up to 128GB of unified memory.

While you could theoretically use the computer as a graphics workstation or gaming PC, it’s cl early designed first and foremost as a development system with support for running 120B+prameter AI models locally. Microsoft says the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box “ships with developer optimized Windows 11 experience,” with tools like Visual Studio Code, GitHub Copilot, WSL 2 pre-installed and configured, and “Windows settings tuned for development.”

via Windows Blogs