We may soon see Microsoft Surface devices with AMD Ryzen 4000 CPU options. That's based on a listing in the 3DMark 11 database spotted by hardware leaker @_rogame that shows a Surface sporting an AMD Ryzen 5 4500U APU and a AMD Radeon RX 5300M mobile graphics card.
The listing didn't reveal if the unit tested was a Surface Laptop, Surface Book or Surface Tablet. Regardless, the device tested seemingly packs decent firepower.
The Ryzen 5 4500U (codename Renoir) is based on AMD's latest Zen 2 microarchitecture and manufactured on TSMC's 7nm FinFET process. The hexa-core processor has a 2.3 GHz base clock and a boost clock that climbs to 4 GHz. The Ryzen 5 4500U runs within the 15W envelope, so it'll be a good fit for Microsoft's slim devices.
The Ryzen 5 4500U has its own integrated graphics with six Vega Compute Units (CUs) that tick up to 1,500 MHz. However, it would appear that Microsoft might kick the graphics aspect of the Surface device up a notch by pairing it with a discrete graphics card from the AMD camp as well.
The 3DMark 11 submission doesn't specify the exact model of the device's graphics card but points to 3GB of onboard memory. AMD currently has four Navi-based mobile graphics cards, and of those four, only the Radeon RX 5300M comes with 3GB of (GDDR6) memory.
The Radeon RX 5300M is built around the Navi 14 silicon that also benefits from TSMC's 7nm node. The graphics card features 22 CUs, equivalent to 1,408 Stream Processors (SPs), and operates with a 1,181 MHz game clock and 1,445 MHz boost clock. The memory is clocked at 14 Gbps across a 96-bit memory interface, which works out to a memory bandwidth of 168 GBps.
It's refreshing to see manufacturers going all in with AMD. Nowadays, you can find a lot of laptops that either use an AMD processor or graphics card, but rarely do you see one that employs both (the MSI Alpha 15 is one example). There are still a lot of options in AMD's arsenal, such as the Ryzen 7 4800U, Ryzen 7 4700U for CPUs and RX 5500M or RX 5600M for graphics. It'll be interesting to see what combination Microsoft might come up with in future Surface products.
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Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
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Arttemis So now that the Surface Book 3 and Go 2 have been announced, where is the Ryzen 4000 Surface device!? I was itching to pull the trigger on a 4X00-powered SB3, but all they had was the Intel chips on display, which was hugely disappointing.Reply
Now, I'm just hoping the Surface Pro 8 line gets pushed back to Q1/2 of next year and sports the 5000 series with bezels and Type Cover of the Surface Pro X line.