Microsoft Makes its own Processor for Surface Pro X
Microsoft yesterday has announced their new surface pro line up which although they have new design elements, the hardware upgrades were minor at best.
However, the most intriguing part of the launch was the announcement of Surface Pro X and with that, the announcement of its own processor called SQ1. Which is not so surprising since every hardware vendor dreams of its own ecosystem with both controls over both hardware and software. Apple, Samsung are doing it already and google is also slowly entering this craze.
So what is inside SQ1?
Microsoft and Qualcomm have collaborated on this custom CPU so this is based on Snapdragon CPU which in turn is based on ARM CPU. So this is essentially Microsoft’s answer to future Hardware i.e. Windows on ARM.
It has an ARM CPU, an AI accelerator and a GPU built in and since this is not a mobile phone device, the power envelope has been scaled to 7W. Nothing much is known about CPU performance except that it is running at 3Ghz with 8cores, manufactured with 7nm process and “it delivers three times more performance per watt than the Surface Pro 6”
The GPU maxes out at 2 teraflops which is not bad (this is still not clear if this is at FP16 or FP32, however it should most probably at FP16). The AI accelerator can perform at 9 TOPS.
So there you have it, Microsoft’s own CPU which will prove to be very popular because of battery-friendly nature. If Microsoft can tweak its software to make the experience very fluid then Apple might have some competition to iPad Pros which are now aiming for laptop replacement.
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