These systems are being pitched at developers working with local AI models, some of which take tens of gigabytes of memory. During Microsoft’s presentation, models as big as 60GB were touted, and the 128GB unified memory maximum was hyped as a key benefit. That sounds very much like Apple’s MacBook Pro pitch these days.
Specs between the two systems are very hard to compare, as neither company really lists comparable features or performance figures. But let’s take the full-size RTX Spark laptop and stack it up next to the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Max:
| M5 Max MacBook Pro | RTX Spark Surface Ultra | |
|---|---|---|
| Price as configured | $6,999 | $5,899 |
| CPU cores | 18 cores (6 super, 12 performance) | 20 cores (10 performance, 10 efficiency) |
| GPU cores | 40 cores | 6,144 cores |
| RAM | 128 GB (614 GB/sec) | 128 GB (300 GB/sec) |
| SSD | 2 TB | 1 TB |
You currently can’t get more than a 1TB SSD in the Surface Ultra if you choose the full-size processor with all the CPU and GPU cores. And you can’t get less than a 2TB drive from Apple in the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Max with all its cores. But in other configurations, Microsoft charges $400 more for the 2TB SSD.
The chip specs are equally hard to compare, because the cores are different, and performance claims don’t use the same figures. But we can get some idea of relative CPU performance by looking at the benchmarks of the DGX Spark, which is a Linux-based desktop system that uses a version of the chip with identical specs as the RTX spark. The RTX Spark is basically the DGX Spark made for Windows 11 ARM laptops.
There’s a reason why Microsoft compared it to the M5 Pro. Apple’s M5 Max CPU absolutely crushes the DGX Spark CPU in Geekbench. Nvidia’s chip gets a single-core score of ~2,600 and multi-core score of ~23,700. Apple lands at ~3,700 single-core and ~35,600 multi-core. Yeah, 40-50 percent faster. I don’t think Apple has anything to worry about.
The GPU is where it gets more interesting. Both Apple and Nvidia have GPUs that are optimized for doing AI work, but they don’t list comparable specs. Nvidia claims 1 petaflop of FP4 performance, but you won’t find maximum performance specs using that format for Apple’s chip.
