Rumor: Microsoft will release its successor Surface Pro X with ARM-soc next month

Microsoft would like to present a successor to its Surface Pro X tablet with ARM-soc next month. That soc would bear the name SQ2 and be based on the new 8cx Gen 2 5G-soc from Qualcomm.

The SQ2 should offer better performance than the SQ1 from last year’s first Surface Pro X, according to Windows Central, but other changes are unknown. The 8cx Gen 2 5G on which Microsoft would base it, Qualcomm announced recently.

That 8cx Gen 2 includes a new one digital signal processor compared to its predecessor. The Hexagon 690 is the new dsp, because the previous version contains the Hexagon 685. The 690 has a ‘tensor accelerator’ for better performance in machine learning. With a Hexagon 685, those kinds of tasks fall to the DSP itself, in combination with the CPU and GPU. That CPU and GPU are unchanged from the 8cx.