Leak suggests that Microsoft is working on another AMD Surface product

Microsoft may be planning to use AMD Ryzen APUs in an upcoming Surface product. The rumour stems from a series of posts made by a regular member of the TabletPCReview forums. The poster has previously offered accurate information about the Surface Go 2 and Surface Pro 7 months before their launch, for reference.

According to the posts, which have been shared on r/AMD and r/Surface, a 4.8 W AMD Ryzen APU is being tested. This APU, codenamed Pollock, could "conceivably be used in a Go 2 successor". The APU is said to offer considerably better performance per watt than the Core m3-8100Y. However, "heat remains an issue", especially in a footprint as small as Surface Go 2's. There is no indication of when this AMD "Pollock" Surface product would come to market though, if at all.

This is not the first time that we have seen a reference to the AMD "Pollock", though. In February, Phoronix noticed that AMD patched the AMDGPU DRM driver to include support for Pollock. The website posited that the Pollock is similar to AMD Dali APUs. The Dali architecture offers two Zen cores and is manufactured on a 14 nm process. Dali APUs have between 6 W and 12 W TDPs, too.

The lack of product certifications with the likes of the FCC would suggest that Microsoft is not close to releasing any new Surface products, either. Microsoft has only released one AMD-powered Surface product so far, the Surface Laptop 3. In our experience, while even the Ryzen 5 model nearly matched something like the Core i7-1065G7 on performance, the APU ran hotter than competing Intel laptops. With that said, devices like the Acer Swift 3 SF314-42 have shown that AMD has made great strides in both departments with its Renoir architecture.