Hands On: Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2 Gains AI Chip, Aluminum Body

pcmag.com:

Microsoft Copilot was, by far, the star of the Microsoft event in New York on Sept. 21. It’s coming to everything Microsoft, in myriad ways and forms. The Surface hardware that Redmond decloaked was a sideshow, and perhaps a tad subdued with the departure of Panos Panay, Microsoft’s animated chief of the Surface world.

But the flexible flagship Surface Laptop for creators, the Surface Laptop Studio, did see some interesting enhancements in its 2023 Studio 2 incarnation, introduced today and opening for pre-orders. These include the surprise addition of an Intel Movidius discrete neural processor, designed for powering local AI tasks, alongside updated core components, more ports and slots, and a whole new chassis build.

We covered earlier this week the disclosures around Intel’s “Meteor Lake” processor line and the debut of the new Core Ultra family of CPUs, expected to hit premium laptops by the end of the year. But interestingly, the new Surface top dog will not feature one of these cutting-edge processors, which are slated to debut December 14. Instead, it will employ a 13th Gen Core H-series “Raptor Lake” processor, the Core i7-13700H, and alongside it a separate NPU, or neural processing engine, dubbed the Movidius 3700VC, a discrete chip from Intel. 

This is an interesting development, in that the soon-coming Intel Meteor Lake chips will integrate an NPU with the CPU, as part of one of the “chiplets” that comprise the new generation of Intel processors. It’s not the first appearance of an dedicated AI processor in a Surface device, mind you; those honors go to the Qualcomm Arm SQ3 version of the Surface Pro 9 that debuted around a year ago. But it’s notable that here it’s a discrete AI chip, not part of the