Benchmark Results Suggest Microsoft May Be Eyeing up Another AMD Ryzen-Powered Surface Device

New findings suggest Microsoft is once again looking to AMD chips to power its Surface devices. Microsoft seems to be preparing several devices featuring AMD’s Ryzen 4000 APUs.

There’s already one device, the Surface Laptop 3, sporting an AMD chip, specifically, a custom-built Ryzen 7 CPU packing RX Vega 11 Graphics, but there’s been no news from Microsoft that it was looking to repeat this in any upcoming products. That is, until now.

A 3D Mark 11 listing, picked up by Twitter user _rogame, appears to showcase a Surface device using an AMD Ryzen 5 4500U processor.  It looks like the CPU is accompanied by a GPU with 3,072 MB of memory, possibly a Radeon RX 5300M GPU, which suggests Microsoft is looking to up the graphical capabilities of the device, whatever it may be.

_rogame reckons this may be a new version of Microsoft’s Surface Book 3, but we can’t discount the AMD chip showing up in a Surface Laptop or Tablet. Or even the yet-to-be-released Surface Laptop 4. Adding weight to this theory is the fact that the Laptop 3 detachable screen centers on Intel hardware.

Precisely what device we are looking at here is unclear, but what’s certain is the machine packs quite a bit of power going by rumors that AMD’s Ryzen 5 4500U trumps Intel’s Core i7-1065G5 processor by at least a third in terms of raw performance.

From what we know, the Ryzen 5 4500U uses a 7nm process and AMD Zen2 architecture with an eye on powering devices on the smaller end of the size scale. Specifications are expected to hit around 2.3 GHz for the base clock speed up to 4 GHz for the boost clock speed. We can expect a 15 W TDP and an integrated Radeon RX Vega 6 GPU with a clock speed of 1,500 MHz as well.

For the moment, this all remains very speculative, but if Microsoft is planning another AMD Surface device, then we can expect an announcement towards the tail end of this year.