Already Working on 2nd Gen: AMD’s Ryzen Microsoft Surface Edition and what Semi-Custo

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One of the key takeaways from Microsoft’s launch this week was that the company was spreading its wings with devices made by all three major SoC vendors: Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. Both the AMD and Qualcomm design wins are especially important given that these companies did not traditionally have a foothold in this space. Both companies showcased unique silicon for Microsoft, with AMD’s Ryzen Microsoft Surface Edition going into the consumer-grade Surface Laptop 3, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SQ1 in the Surface Pro X. We sat down with AMD to better understand this partnership.

Just to cover the announcement made at Microsoft’s Event: the Surface Laptop 3 from AMD will be a 15-inch laptop design focused at the consumer market (compared to the Ice Lake version for businesses). It features a quad-core Zen+ 12nm APU with up to 11 compute units of Vega graphics within a standard 15W TDP design: this is unique as no other Ryzen Mobile processor offers 11 compute units at 15 watts. The 15-inch 2496x1664 display has an odd resolution, but focuses on the 3:2 aspect ratio that Microsoft likes and supports 10-point multi-touch and pen support. The AMD version will be offered with up to 32 GB of DDR4-2400 memory and 512GB/1TB of NVMe storage, and vary in price from $1199 (Ryzen 5, 8GB, 128GB) up to $2799 (Ryzen 7, 32GB, 1TB). This means that the Surface Laptop 3 should be a good fit for some mainstream gaming and performance workloads.

Jack Huynh, Corporate VP and GM of the Semi-Custom Group at AMD, and Sebastien Nussbaum, CVP and Senior Fellow at AMD, took time to speak with us over the phone about the relationship between AMD and Microsoft. Unfortunately the call recording failed, and so here is a summary of the key insights.

Firstly, AMD and Microsoft are not just doing a single generation of hardware. In our call we were told that both companies are looking at the next generation of product for this market. Up until this point we were told that his was a ‘multi-year partnership’, but AMD’s commentary clarified that the collaboration is going to be over multiple generations of hardware and products. Given what we know about AMD’s product cycle time as well as Microsoft’s, we could envisage the next generation being built upon a Zen 2 design with something RDNA related – AMD is expected to release Renoir next year, which might be a push in this direction.

A number of comments was made to the effect of Microsoft using one of AMD’s 12nm Zen+ Ryzen Mobile processors, rather than something built with the higher performance Zen2 microarchitecture on 7nm, which would have afforded power gains. AMD explained that this sort of device has a long design cycle, and as a result when AMD and Microsoft began collaborating on an AMD based Surface device, there was a certain degree of co-design and co-optimization that had to happen 24 months ago, and then intercept at the right time for both companies. To that end, the current Ryzen Mobile platform built on 12nm Zen+ with Vega (or, ‘Picasso’) was the right part.
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