Microsoft is apparently currently experiencing a bit of an “Apple moment”. A Surface Laptop has appeared in China with a CPU from the Intel “Lunar Lake” family. The problem: the device doesn’t officially exist yet. It is a prototype.
Microsoft will soon be bringing a new Surface Laptop onto the market, among other things. This is now revealed in advance on a Chinese online sales platform called Goofish discontinued prototype of a Surface Laptop with Intel “Lunar Lake” under the hood. Intel has just introduced the new chips and Microsoft is obviously one of the PC manufacturers that want to use the significantly more efficient platform.
In the current model year, the latest Surface models in the form of the Surface Laptop 7 and the Surface Pro 11 are all equipped with Qualcomm’s new ARM processors from the Snapdragon X family. However, Microsoft apparently doesn’t want to commit itself exclusively to ARM chips yet and is therefore also working on variants with the new x86-based “Lunar Lake” chips.
The device, which is listed in China for the equivalent of a good 1,400 euros, is initial evidence of this, although the seller states that this model has yet to officially come onto the market and will then probably cost around 2,500 euros. The technical data also makes this clear, with various photos attached as proof of the authenticity of the device, which clearly show that one of the new Intel chips is installed here.
Visually, there doesn’t seem to be much going on with the next-generation Intel-based Surface Laptop. So there is again a platinum gray case with a 3:2 format display, which has a glass cover and PixelSense technology and probably also support for the Surface Pen. Under the hood is the prototype shown here Intel Core Ultra 7 268V. This is an eight-core chip with four energy-saving and four high-end cores, for which Intel specifies a base clock of 2.2 gigahertz.
The power-saving cores can reach up to 3.7 GHz in turbo mode, while the performance cores can clock up to 5.0 GHz. The chip uses a maximum of 37 watts in turbo mode and comes from the state-of-the-art 3-nanometer production at TSMC. In the case of the prototype, Microsoft combines it with 32 gigabytes of RAM and a 1 terabyte SSD. It should be noted here that the RAM is a direct part of the CPU package and therefore cannot be expanded.
Unfortunately, no further information can be seen in the photos from the Chinese seller, for example the port selection on the case. According to sources close to Microsoft, the Windows Central quoted, it is currently unclear whether it is simply an Intel variant of the current Surface Laptop 7 or whether we are dealing with a next-generation model. Prototypes with Intel “Lunar Lake” are actually already being tested internally. The code name for this model is said to be “EVB”.
