Microsoft launched Surface Pro 8 and Surface Duo 2 last week. Both products contain x86 hardware, but none of them use Arm chips. What’s the reason? One may be in progress, and AMD may be involved in the design. This is only a rumor at the moment, but it may be a credible rumor because both companies are interested in Arm.
Earlier this month, at the Deutsche Bank Technology Conference, AMD CFO Devinder Kumar answered questions about Arm. He said that AMD has a very good relationship with the company and added that We understand that customers want to be with us. Cooperation to provide Arm-based solutions.
As for Microsoft, it has made efforts to run Windows on Arm hardware and has also provided designs in this area. Especially the Surface Pro X we reviewed last year. So the question is, are Microsoft and AMD making a fuss on Arm?
AMD is collaborating with Microsoft to equip powerful ARM laptop processor in Surface.
Target perf: lower than GTX1050 class but much better than Qualcomm chip that uses the old arch. and in the overall lightweight ARM laptops.
GPU: 4WGP, 8CU
(1/2)Sourcehttps://t.co/ktt0SfgWjV https://t.co/vqkzQEwEjx
— Tron ❂ (@FrontTron) October 1, 2021
Yes, according to the latest rumors in a forum in South Korea. Said AMD is using its long-term manufacturing partner TSMC to manufacture chips on its 5-nanometer manufacturing process. It is said that AMD initially approached Samsung, but it encountered capacity problems, which delayed the release time.
Assuming this is true, then perhaps the original intention is to let a new generation of Arm-based Surface products be released together with Surface Pro 8 and Surface Duo 2. To this end, further pointed out that AMD hopes to complete this work in 2021. The shipment of chip samples is obviously not far away, but no specific time is mentioned-if we have to make bold guesses, it may be unveiled at or around CES in January next year.
AMD’s custom Arm chip is said to be based on Cortex X1. It will not have an integrated modem, but rely on Samsung and its Exynos hardware to complete the work of the 5G modem, but according to rumors, it will include an AMD GPU and is expected to achieve an RDNA 2 integration.
According to reports, the GPU has 8 computing units, and the target performance is lower than that of GeForce GTX 1050 but higher than any product currently offered by Qualcomm. It is not clear where this chip will eventually appear. Could it be Surface Pro X 2 or Surface Go X, maybe even a brand new Surface product series?
At the same time, let us not forget that Samsung is developing a version of its Arm-based Exynos SoC, which will also integrate RDNA 2 graphics, and it may be found on the Galaxy S22. Therefore, next year may be an interesting year, because it is related to AMD’s efforts in the Arm field.
