Microsoft Announces Surface Laptop 3 Family: Now Including 15-Inch Models & Custom AM

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Kicking off the holiday quarter for Microsoft, today the company held its annual Surface press event, where the company announced a slate of new laptops, tablets, & 2-in-1s for the PC market. While there are a few items to get through, probably the marquee announcement for AnandTech readers is the Surface Laptop 3 family. The latest iteration of Microsoft’s laptops aren’t changing too much in terms of overall design, but this year’s models include a new 15-inch model, as well as models that incorporate semi-custom AMD Ryzen APUs, marking the first time AMD has landed a deal for a Surface device.

Surface Laptop 3: Adding Ice Lake & USB-C

Starting from the top, the Surface Laptop 3 family is a pretty straightforward follow-up to last year’s Surface Laptop 2. In terms of the 13.5-inch model – which until now has been the only model – Microsoft isn’t doing anything radical in terms of form factor or function, so the wedge-shaped laptop still fulfills the basic role of serving as Microsoft’s upscale, in-house designed laptop.

Under the hood, Microsoft has given the Surface Laptop 3 a full generational update, replacing Intel’s 8th gen Core processors with the company’s 10th gen Core “Ice Lake” parts. Ice Lake, as regular readers might recall, are one-half of Intel’s 10th generation family, incorporating all of Intel’s latest technologies from CPU to GPU to networking, and for this year are being reserved for high-end devices like the Surface Laptop. The 13.5-inch Surface Laptop 3 can be ordered with either the Core i5-1035G7, or the Core i7-1065G7. Both of these are quad core parts on the CPU side and 64 EU parts on the GPU side; and while the CPU performance gains are going to be somewhat limited relative to the Surface Laptop 2 (especially the i7), on the GPU side of matters these new laptops are going to be vastly faster when it comes to graphics.

The shift to Ice Lake means that Microsoft also finally gets to make the long-anticipated jump from LPDDR3 to LPDDR4X. Like other Ice Lake laptop vendors, Microsoft will be running their memory at the full 3733 Mbps speed that Ice Lake can support, with either 8GB or 16GB of memory. And since this is LPDDR, it’s worth reminding everyone that it is soldered-down, so this isn’t user-upgradable.

Ice Lake also means the Surface Laptop is getting a networking upgrade. Whereas the previous generation part shipped with an 802.11ac + BT 4.1 solution powered by a Marvell controller, Surface Laptop 3 gets 802.11ax + BT 5.0. Microsoft isn’t explicitly specifying that they’re using Intel’s wireless technology here, but given that it’s one of the main features of Ice Lake and partially integrated into the SoC, I would be very surprised to see anything else.

Meanwhile, according to Microsoft storage is being provided via M.2 NVMe SSDs. This is a notable improvement for the laptop family, as Microsoft was previously using soldered-down BGA SSDs. The switch to M.2 cards means that the drives are replaceable (albeit not recommended for the layman), and while we’ll have to wait and see a review sample to see what vendors Microsoft is sourcing from, there’s a good chance that this will finally be PCIe 3.0 x4 drives, as opposed to the x2 BGA drives. Overall, Microsoft is offering the same capacities as last time, ranging from 128GB to 1TB, at quickly escalating prices.
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