AMD Ryzen 7 Renoir Microsoft Surface Edition shows up on UserBenchmark dashing hopes for Ryzen 5000 in the Surface Laptop 4

We previously reported that the upcoming Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 would feature an AMD Renoir Surface Edition APU (apart from Tiger Lake-U offerings as well). We've seen the Renoir Surface Edition APU, well, surface on Geekbench before and now we get to see it on UserBenchmark.

The UserBenchmark listing of the AMD Renoir Surface Edition was first spotted by @TUM_APISAK on Twitter. The entry shows an 8C/16T Ryzen 7 Microsoft Surface Edition part with a base clock of 2 GHz and a boost of 3.7 GHz along with its Radeon RX Vega 8 GPU. The listing also indicates the device is equipped with 16 GB dual-channel LPDD4-4266 RAM.

In October 2019, AMD partnered with Microsoft to introduce a custom Ryzen APU — the Ryzen 7 3780U — which made its debut in the Surface Laptop 3 15. For the upcoming Surface Laptop 4, rumor is that Microsoft has opted for the Ryzen 5 4680U and the Ryzen 7 4980U APUs based on the Renoir architecture.

Using a Renoir APU in 2021 despite AMD having already released Ryzen 5000 Zen 3 parts does raise a few questions, though. The exact reasons for this are still anyone's guess at this point. There is a possibility that Microsoft is keeping things tightly wrapped and that we might actually see a more powerful Surface Laptop with Ryzen 5000 and a lower tier SKU with Renoir APUs. Or, it could be that we are essentially looking at a custom Lucienne part, which isn't too different from Renoir.

Apart from AMD, Microsoft will also be using Tiger Lake-U parts in certain SKUs. Given the distinct advantages of Renoir and Tiger Lake in CPU and GPU performance, respectively, it will be interesting to see how Microsoft would market the strengths of each Surface Laptop 4 SKU.

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