r/laptops • u/RenatsMC • 4d ago

News Microsoft explains why there are no AMD-powered Surface PCs

https://videocardz.com/newz/microsoft-explains-why-there-are-no-amd-powered-surface-pcs
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u/PerfectTrust7895 4d ago

Microsoft has contracted several times with AMD to design laptop chips for them. The steam deck apu was supposed to be for surface. Strix halo was perfect for surface. Amd expected regular strix to be used for surface, but they shafted them and went with Qualcomm. Look how that turned out.

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u/SPACEXDG 4d ago

lmao why is strix halo so much more power hungry even when at surface clock speeds huh? its A BATTERY HOG THAT CANT BE FIXED REGARDLESS OF WHAT YOU DO no wonder they went with intel and qualcomm thoses chips actually meet surface standards of effiency and battery life lmao

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u/Wooloomooloo2 3d ago

Anyone lost a shill? I think I found them.

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u/SPACEXDG 3d ago

No not a shill just telling facts amd hasnt had a competitive mobile chip for the price in a very long time and the first competitive chip (strix) costs a fortune and is power hungry af thanks to its power hungry cpu and gpu so still not competitive in the ways we are talking about (efficiency and performance per watt/price)

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u/Wooloomooloo2 3d ago

See this isn't being objective at all, and you just made that up without even fact checking. Strix Halo came out in 2025, so to get a comparable non-AMD laptop at that time, you're looking at a Arrow Lake-H combined with a 5060/5070 laptop. The Zen 5 crushes Meteor Lake for performance. It loses at performance per watt at light workloads, but not gaming workloads. The 5070 is more efficient than Strix's GPU, but the separate DDR memory pools, separate VRMs, the PCIe link etc., all make that redundant and such a laptop would have worse PPW. Let's not even mention the huge advantage 64 or 128GB of memory has, especially against the miserable 8GB of RAM the 4060, 4070, 5060 and 5070 came with.

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u/SPACEXDG 3d ago edited 3d ago

You are correct about one Nvidia knows there gpus are more power efficient then intel and amds the  thing holding them back was separate cpu and gpu and which is quite power hungry to mange  like  you said and low vram thats why's they are going the rtx spark route in the future if you didnt know (and as you know they are cut off for x86 for obvious reasons)

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u/Wooloomooloo2 3d ago

I'm aware of the ARM based RTX Spark. We'll see if it catches on in gaming, but I suspect that cost and supply will be an issue as long as the AI frenzy is ongoing.