Bummer. About three weeks ago, a report surfaced alleging that the AMD variant of the upcoming Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 will be using the last generation Ryzen 4000 based processors.
This, despite the fact that AMD has already released its mobile 5000 series APUs based on the Zen 3 architecture. And these are chips that definitely bring home the bacon when it comes to performance and energy consumption.
Using older processors in such expensive hardware makes little sense. But as it turns out, this is exactly what Redmond seems to be doing — strange as it sounds.
A UserBenchmark entry of a PC featuring the AMD Ryzen 7 Microsoft Surface Edition was spotted by a leakster on Twitter. And while that may not mean much on its own, it is the integrated graphics (iGP) of this unknown APU that gives away which family of processors it belongs to.
AMD stuck with the Vega architecture for its integrated graphics since the initial Ryzen 2000 series APU, with tweaks here and there.
The AMD Ryzen 7 Microsoft Surface Edition that has been spotted today features the RX Vega 8 4000, likely indicating that it belongs to the last generation Zen 2 based Ryzen 4000 family, codenamed Renoir. It appears to be an 8-core, 16-thread part with a base clock of 2GHz.
The SKU is most similar to the Ryzen 7 4800U, albeit with higher clocks. The integrated Vega 8 also seemingly performs better than other similar samples.
No official confirmation for this, of course.
But we are sure to find out by the middle of April when both the Intel and AMD variants of the Surface Laptop 4 are launched by Microsoft at an event held virtually.
