Surface Pro 8 - Speculation and Rumors

And the Red states have them as super spreader centers

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The new Verge battery benchmark: the Starbuck’s all-day challenge. The company that wins gets a lifetime supply of stickers with Steve Jobs’ face on it.

Now I know why Elon Musk is having SpaceX work overtime... big brain logic time: Starbucks in space. One, you can’t have lockdowns when you are a million miles away from the disease. And two, you can now run your MacBook all day in an actual Starbucks... depending on what one day or the rate of rotation is of the heavenly body you are on.

 

I've said it before but my money is still on simply a spec bump to 11th gen core I and no external changes. The XE graphics will give enough of a bump to make it a no brainer for companies that are already on board with the Surface Pro to continue.

As a side note, based on our testing of three other EVO based systems , Even though USB raw performance isn't really changed with version 4, it is far more stable and backwards compatible than version 3 in the 7 .

For Example :In our tests, the current pro scored 74% , a dell latitude with 11th gen we just tested scored 93%

One other broader and hopefully non contentious statement on Apples M1. Regardless of the arguments on individual aspects of the chips design versus intel or AMD I think we all stand to benefit in the long run because if nothing else it will put pressure on all the PC vendors they haven't faced before to improve their offerings.

What Apple did really is remarkable and while I wouldn't go as far as to call it a game changer (way overused in my opinion) it does bring new competition in a way the PC market hasn't seen in a long time. And something that WOA should have done, but so far hasn't ...

 

Indeed. I cheered when AMD did a comeback this past year (I was an Athlon64 fan back in the day, building my own gaming desktops). Intel’s Tiger Lake was encouraging, though implementation test results seem all over the place. And I’ve already tipped my hat to Apple for the apparent success of the M1. Each and every CPU/GPU/SOC improvement is a plus in my book, no matter who does it.

On topic, a Tiger Lake Surface Pro 8, properly implemented with the best graphics, would be tempting. I’m really liking my second try on a SP4. A Ryzen version would similarly be tempting but it does not seem likely to me.

However, where the rubber meets the road, in my own kind of daily use, the SP4 i5 8/256 performs perfectly well enough so that my only reason to spend money on an upgrade would be the ol’ New Gadget Acquisition Itch.

 

I think for many of us here, it's more of an obsession.... He says as he was caught by his wife looking at and pricing out a top end Air configuration this morning

 

<<...He says as he was caught by his wife looking at...>>

Hmmm... Sunday, too. Couldn't wait...?!??

 

How about Surface Go 3? Do you fully expect a spec bump to not occur until about two years again after this last Gen 2 refresh? One might argue that iPad and Chromebooks are asserting dominance, but I get the impression that the pandemic’s increased demand and short supply of the Go 2 has not made it an urgent matter for them to improve their design’s competitiveness any time soon.

Switching gears, I will note that the Pro 7 did get USB-C with DisplayPort 1.4–DP 1.4 support starting with Intel’s 10th Gen Ice Lake, AMD’s Ryzen 4000 version of RX Vega, and NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2000 series graphics—which supports up to three simultaneous 4K 60 Hz monitors from a single connection. I think there is a remote possibility of a “one more thing” with Surface Pro 8 given that the line is in need of some livening up since the design has stagnated.

One idea of what that “one more thing” might be is improved repairability and a user accessible hard drive that is already in the Pro X. This would be preferred in my mind over defaulting to the same mildly improved Surface Pro 4 design that they have recycled for the three iterations.

I think if we at least see some of the advances (removable drive and improved repairability) pulled over from the Pro X that that might be a nice to have even if the general chassis dimensions stayed the same for the sake of ease of upgrade for corporate clientele. There were rumors that the Pro line was supposed to gain at least some of the Pro X’s design improvements last year but it did not happen due to development timelines not intersecting at just the right points.

The last word I heard was it got postponed but at least not totally canned, and it would be good to see something more beyond USB-C for this next release.

 

I was actually going to come back to this thread today, because of a "hmmm" moment I had yesterday and this morning.

I'm using one of the EVO platform Dells today and of course it has TB4 integrated.

So the wrinkle is that if MS does go with the expected 11th gen core I chips, what are they going to do with the onboard TB4?

One the one hand, they already have the space and physical connector in the current pro enclosure that could function as the TB4/USB4 port. But.... It then puts the surface connector in a weird spot, since by multiple measures, TB4 (with a suitable dock) would exceed the functionality of the Surface port.

And to add to this , they just revved the dock and the connector port this year, slightly anyway with the release of the Surface Book 3 though the only public thing they have said is that it was to allow additional power to support the discrete graphics in the Surface Book 3.

So resolving this dilemma to my mind opens the door slightly to a more comprehensive re-design of a Pro 8. I say slightly though, because 99% of the reasons that the pro isn't already "Pro X like" still exist with the 11th gen core I

As to the Go3 , a lot of what we've heard speculated before the release of the Go 2 didn't pan out at least so far.

1. Rumor one- It moves to WOA- I think that was the leading candidate and may have even reached the working prototype stage. And Qualcomm had talked about a "7cx" chip family that was essentially a more economical version of the 8CX (which MS branded as the Sq1 for the Pro X)

But then the reality of the Pro X happened.... Remember, in the run up to announcement of the Pro X, Qualcomm was claiming core i5 or core i7 levels of performance for the 8Cx, but I think we all know how that panned out.

2. Rumor two- After the relative bust that was the SQ1, they started looking at Intel's Lakefield. But after AnandTech and other sites essentially eviscerated the one shipping Lakefield system, the variation of the Samsung of the Book S (which performed significantly worse than the WOA version), I'm reasonably sure that this option is now dead

3. Rumor three- AMDs 4.8 watt TDP Ryzen platform. This one actually might have emerged as a stronger possibility, if nothing else because of number one and two above.

I'm constrained by NDA from elaborating, but if the 4.8 watt Ryzen could fix a couple of issues that we saw in the prototype (and AMD was extremely receptive to what we had to say about it), I think it could emerge as the come from behind winner as it has HUGE potential for Go type devices

BTW: as a side note, they would need to make a few minor modifications to the existing enclosure to make the switch. but again very minor.

4. Rumor four (and I think sadly the more likely option) is they just go with an updated Pentium/Core M combo. Those are in the works and seem timed to be available in the likely time frame for a Go 3.

It is the most conservative option, but given that the Go is the single biggest selling Surface product, marketing and sales 101 dictates you don't mess with success

So once again this board has called forth a tome from me to start the week

PS: MS has a hand in the knife in the back of Lakefield as it's totally unsuited to an asynchronous core design like Lakefield. That is something we expect Windows X to seriously address though

 

Have a Phil Schiller "courage" moment and remove the Surface Connector for a SECOND TB4 port...how tough can this be? Offer a Surface Connector adapter for those hallowed business bean counter who want to squeeze ten years out of their Surface Dock I and move into the third decade of the 21st Century for crying out loud. But knowing MS they will just wire the TB4 lanes to the Surface Connector to make it SUPER CONNECTOR. As sad as it sounds, MS is just as stupid about Thunderbolt as Apple was about the butterfly keyboard...

If by some quirk of fate MS does screw up their courage for this change, please, please, please bring back EMR as well...

OMG, he's hallucinating on Monday morning...

 

Do you believe this will be the preexisting 10th Gen (so far, the Go line has used older, more field-tested processors) or something fresher and newer like these 10nm options below? The Intel Gold option looks especially tantalizing and at the point that Microsoft might be ready, it would be a huge step up from the Go 2. It would give the Go 3 Tiger Lake on the CPU front and, despite the UHD Graphics branding, it would have the same latest graphics Xe hardware with 48 execution units, as many as the i7 Surface Pro 5.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/i...-x6000e-elkhart-lake-celeron-and-pentium-cpus

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel...-a-new-Tiger-Lake-based-variant.498370.0.html