Surface Laptop 4 leaks suggest a mix of AMD and Intel CPUs

There may be a standalone Surface webcam on the way, too.

We’re starting to see leaks about Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 4, which is rumoured to be launching in the spring. A new report says both the 13.5in and 15in 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 has reported 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-theart Zen 3 underlying the newer Ryzen 5000 laptop chips.

The plot thickens: WinFuture adds 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.