The Microsoft Surface Laptop has its fans. It’s thin, it’s fast, and it works. The latest rendition of the laptop also bears the flag for a new generation of Qualcomm’s ARM-based Snapdragon Elite chips on Windows PCs. But it seems Microsoft might have a surprise for all those wanting an Intel x86 Lunar Lake chip that can go toe-to-toe in performance and battery life without sacrificing software compatibility.
A Microsoft Surface laptop… surfaced on the Chinese website Goofish bearing an Intel’s Lunar Lake chip made for ultra-small notebooks. Redditors and Windows Central first picked up on the leak, but it’s not something Gizmodo can independently confirm since the entry has since been deleted. Based on anonymous sources; Windows Central noted that Microsoft is testing Lunark Lake Surface Laptops. These new models could arrive as soon as 2025 if the anonymous sources are to be believed.
We don’t know if Microsoft would simply repeat the Surface Laptop 7 or launch a new Surface Laptop 8, but we’re far more curious about how this specific Surface bore an Intel Core Ultra 7 268V. That’s a significant step up from many of the first sub-16-inch laptops with Lunar Lake, like the Asus Zenbook S 14, which contained either a Core Ultra 7 256V or a 258V, while larger laptops like the still-unreleased Acer Swift 16 AI are supposed to have the Core Ultra 9 288V.
If Microsoft is considering releasing a next-gen Surface Laptop, it would be at the top of its class. The 268V has four cores and four threads, plus a 5.0 clock speed and the second highest-frequency Arc 140V GPU in the Ultra 2 lineup. It has the same memory as the top-end Core Ultra 9 288V, though it doesn’t have nearly the same base TDP.
That specific listing on Goofish noted that the price of this supposed Surface Laptop was 19,000 CNY, or $2,600 U.S. You should take that price with a grain of salt, though the specs are interesting. It was packing 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage, so it would be one of the top-end configurations. A current 13.8-inch Surface Laptop 7 with the Snapdragon Elite CPU, 32 GB of RAM, and 1 TB SSD starts at $2,000, while the 15-inch version goes for $2,100.
The previous version of the Surface Laptop with the first-gen Meteor Lake chips was only available in the company’s business line. Enterprise laptops are usually more expensive than consumer-grade devices, so there may be a reason why the price shown on Goofish was as high as it was.
While we at Gizmodo weren’t nearly as thrilled with the Surface Pro 11’s form factor and battery life, the Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite chip is no joke. It handily beats Meteor Lake and Apple M3 Chips in several benchmarks in multi-core settings. Intel’s Arrow Lake chips were hoping to prove ARM isn’t the future, but we’re still waiting for the top-end chips in an actual laptop to prove that point.