Rumor: Microsoft tests prototype Surface Pro with ARM soc

Microsoft has reportedly developed a prototype Surface Pro tablet with a Qualcomm instead of an Intel processor. The company is said to have considered releasing a low-end Surface Pro with a Snapdragon soc.

While Microsoft has considered releasing a Surface Pro with an ARM soc, it hasn’t happened yet for “several reasons,” writes Brad Sams on Thurrot. Sams regularly writes about internal affairs at Microsoft. He does not say what those different reasons are.

Since the end of 2017, Microsoft and Qualcomm have been promoting so-called Always Connected PCs with Snapdragon SOCs and 4G connectivity and with Windows on ARM as the operating system. Asus, Samsung and Lenovo, among others, released these types of laptops, but not Microsoft itself yet. The laptops are not very successful yet. At the end of last year, Qualcomm introduced its 8cx processor that can be combined with a 5g modem and should offer significantly better performance. The first products with this processor should appear in 2020.

It wouldn’t be the first time Microsoft has bases a Surface product on ARM. That happened before with the Surface RT and Surface 2 tablets, which were not a success. Incidentally, Sams previously wrote that Microsoft is also considering equipping a Surface laptop with an AMD processor instead of an Intel chip. If these plans go through, the laptop should be released by the end of this year.

Thurrot writes about the prototype in response to the availability of Firefox for Windows 10 on ARM. Mozilla doesn’t explicitly mention this, but users of the OS could be running the latest beta of Firefox.

Microsoft Surface RT