If you were hoping that the Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 would come with an AMD Ryzen 5000-series chip, there’s some bad news. A leaked benchmark listing seems to confirm that the laptop will have an older Ryzen 7 4000-series processor instead.
This is obviously quite disappointing news for anyone looking forward to Microsoft’s upcoming laptop because it means the laptop will be running an older chipset, rather than the latest AMD silicon.
- Cloud storage vs external hard disk drive: Which one is better?
- Microsoft Surface Laptop Go vs Surface Laptop 3: Which should you buy?
- Plus: Killer gaming laptop deal just slashed $210 off the Lenovo Legion Y540
The UserBenchmark listing was first spotted by Twitter user @TUM_APISAK. It shows off a Surface machine powered by a Ryzen 7, with a base clock speed of 2GHz and a turbo speed of 3.75Ghz. And the chip comes with a Radeon RX Vega 8 GPU.
That sounds very much like the 4000-series, and not the 5000-series that promises 3.4-4.9GHz clock speeds. So we can’t help but feel a little disappointed that the Surface Laptop 4 might not get this speed boost.
In comparison, the Intel variant of the Surface Laptop 4 is set to come with a Tiger Lake-U CPU. It seems rather an odd decision to have newer chips in the Intel variant of the laptop while sticking to older AMD chips in the other.
Of course, as we’ve noted before, Microsoft may well be getting a custom-made chip from AMD. Previous benchmarking scores have found that 4000-series APUs have higher clock speed and extra compute units that you wouldn’t normally see.
The fact that the benchmark listing refers to the chip as a Ryzen 7 “Microsoft Surface Edition” would corroborate that idea. Or so it seems from the outside. In other words, there’s no telling what these chips might be able to do, even if they aren’t the latest models.
On top of this, the listing mentions the laptop will have 16GB of RAM, which will give the Surface Laptop 4 plenty of RAM to complement the CPU. But nothing is confirmed until it’s confirmed, and Microsoft could come out and surprise us with a machine that’s nothing like what the benchmarks suggest.
Unfortunately, we don’t know when the Surface Laptop 4 is going to be announced. So for now, all we can do is speculate; though we'd not be surprised to see Microsoft reveal a new Surface Laptop later on this Spring.
- More: Where to buy Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 — latest restock updates
