GoKawiilThe consumer tech industry is still absorbing the aftershocks of Nvidia's seismic RTX Spark announcements this week at Computex 2026, and there are still many questions around the platform regarding performance, power, and battery life.
One of those questions is the thermal design power (TDP) of the RTX Spark Superchip that's powering the high-end laptops revealed this week. That power budget is everything in a thermally constrained chassis that has to dynamically share power between the CPU and GPU.
A higher power budget in such a system generally translates into higher performance (albeit not necessarily linearly). And if you know the power budget of one platform, you can better reason about its performance compared to other chips with a similar TDP.
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Tom's Hardware's Paul Alcorn and I attended a series of lightning-round hands-on sessions with Nvidia's core laptop partners this week, and among other standard questions, we asked representatives from those companies what the power and thermal budgets of their systems were. Unsurprisingly, those partners generally declined to answer.
But Microsoft's reps freely shared that the Surface Laptop Ultra, at least, is designed around a TDP of 110 W for the RTX Spark Superchip.
(Image credit: Future)
That figure makes sense, given our experience with the compact DGX Spark mini-PC. That system has an SoC TDP of 140 W, so it's no huge surprise that even the relatively large and well-ventilated Surface Laptop Ultra is designed to dissipate around 80% of that power at peak load.
As a laptop, the Surface also has other components it needs to power, including a screen and any peripherals connected to its USB ports, so extra headroom is required for that purpose. (Other OEMs did disclose that they were including 140W chargers with their devices, so consider that an interesting data point to this end.)
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