On its September Surface Event yesterday, Microsoft showed off some notable updates to its latest devices and impressed all of us with its new Surface Duo 2, Surface Laptop Studio, and Surface Pro 8.
However, there was a notable omission from the party, and yes we are talking about the much expected Arm-based Surface Pro X which now has a new Wi-Fi-only entry-level model.
The Surface Pro X launched in 2019 with a Microsoft SQ1 SoC, which was developed by the Windows maker in collaboration with Qualcomm. This chip is based on the Snapdragon 855 which features four high-performance Arm Cortex-A76 cores and four Cortex-A55 efficiency cores.
Later in the year 2020, Microsoft decided to give the Surface Pro X a minor spec bump by introducing the SQ2 which is based on the Qualcomm 8cx Gen 2 as an option further up the range. However, the only thing which the SQ2 offered was a slightly higher clocked but came with the same underlying architecture as the SQ1.
And you have witnessed, we didn’t see any signs of Qualcomm 8cx Gen 3 in the lead-up to the Surface Event, so we might not see any major announcement from Microsoft about the Surface Pro X any time soon.
There are rumors that both Qualcomm and Microsoft have decided to wait for the impact of the former’s acquisition of Nuvia to embed itself into its next high-performance SoC targeted at Windows 10/11 on Arm machines.
For more information stay tuned.
