The latest details on 2020’s Laptop update come from online benchmarking site 3DMark. They show a Microsoft laptop running AMD’s latest Ryzen series of processors.

According to one listing in the 3DMark 11 database, Microsoft is testing Surface Laptop 4 with AMD Ryzen 5 4500U APU and AMD Radeon RX 5300M mobile graphics card. Ryzen 5 4500U is also known as AMD Renoir and the processor is based on AMD’s Zen 2 microarchitecture. It is a hexa-core processor with 2.3 GHz base clock, which can go up to 4 GHz.

Ryzen 5 4500U is designed to run within the slim devices, thanks to the 15W envelope, which makes it a good fit for Surface Laptop 4 or similar hardware.

This is not the first AMD based Surface. Surface Laptop 3, launched in October 2019, was the first to offer a choice between Intel and AMD. The AMD machines were slightly cheaper and aimed at consumers, while the Intel machine was focused on enterprise customers. The two variants had a marked difference in performance, which was also reflected in the pricing.

At the time the Surface Laptop 3 for Business was better than the AMD version in every important way but the price. The Intel processor offers significantly faster performance and better graphics than its AMD counterpart. You even get an extra 1.5 hours of battery life with the Intel version.

That will have changed with the new Ryzens so it will be interesting to see what Vole does.

If Microsoft follows historical patterns, you can expect the Surface Laptop 4 to be announced in October 2020.