Microsoft is prepping the launch of its Surface 4 laptops in the coming months, with both AMD and Intel variants planned. However, while the latter will feature the latest Tiger Lake-U SKUs, on AMD’s side, we’re once again looking at an older processor lineup: Renoir (Zen 2) instead of the newer Cezanne (Zen 3) APUs.
AMD’s Cezanne lineup offers some significant performance uplifts over Renoir with the Zen 3 CPU core being 25-35% faster in gaming and single-threaded workloads and an even faster Vega iGPU. There are reports of two custom Renoir chips, namely the Ryzen 5 4680U and the Ryzen 7 4980U, both of which will be called the “Surface Edition” processors.
The Ryzen 5 4680U will reportedly come with a base clock of 2GHz and a boost of 4.4GHz. That’s a much higher boost than the 4600U which is limited to a maximum boost of just 4GHz. There are no details regarding the operating clocks of the Ryzen 7 4980U but considering that the 4800U tops out at 4.2GHz, it’s not unreasonable to expect a boost of 4.6GHz.
Both the Ryzen 5 4680U and the Ryzen 7 4980U will come in 13″ and 15″ models, with a maximum of 16GB memory and 512GB of NVMe storage. As far as the Intel models are concerned, the Core i5-1145G7 and Core i7-1185G7 are the two Tiger Lake-U SKUs planned for the Surface 4. Other than the generational difference, they’ll also come with more memory and storage than the Renoir variants: 32GB and 1TB, respectively.
