Credit: Willis Lai / IDG
We're starting to see leaks about Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 4, which is rumoured to be launching in the coming months. A new report says both the 13.5-inch and 15-inch Surface Laptop 4 versions will offer AMD’s Ryzen processors, though they may not be the chips you’re hoping for.
A separate report also claims that Microsoft may release a standalone webcam in April, alongside the Surface Laptop 4.
WinFuture.de reported this week that the probable CPUs inside the new Surface Laptop 4 will include “Surface Editions” of the AMD Ryzen 5 4680U as well as the Ryzen 7 4980U. The mobile Ryzen 4000 series was the first of AMD’s Ryzen chips to yield a tremendous performance boost compared to Intel rivals.
In our review of the Surface Laptop 3, we found the opposite to be true; the Surface Laptop 3 with a 10th-gen “Ice Lake” Core CPU overshadowed the Ryzen-based model. Nevertheless, Ryzen 4000 is an older chip family springing from AMD's Zen 2 architecture, not the state-of-the-art Zen 3 underlying the newer Ryzen 5000 laptop chips.
The plot thickens: WinFuture reports that the Surface Laptop 4's other CPU choice will be brand-new 11th-gen Tiger Lake processors, including the Core i5-1145G7 and the Core i7-1185G7. For users trying to decide which version to buy, it seems almost absurd to have an older AMD chip hoping to get picked ahead of a newer Intel chip. We’ll have to see how performance shapes up.
Aside from the CPU, the Surface Laptop 4 will remain largely unchanged, WinFuture reports. Memory options will top out at 16GB, and up to 512GB of SSD storage will be included.
Microsoft may announce the Surface Laptop 4 at an event in April. If it does, Petri.com thinks we’ll likely see a new, standalone, Microsoft-branded webcam. It’s not clear whether the webcam will support 4K resolution, but it should at least have a privacy shutter, a feature that webcams in Surface products currently lack, though they are otherwise among the best in the business.
