One PC that was notably missing from last year"s Surface product launch was a new Surface Book. Indeed, it"s the only portable Surface that"s still using an eighth-generation Intel Core processor, and it"s now over two years old. It"s likely that we"ll see a spring refresh, and now, some benchmarks have appeared for what could very well be the Surface Book 3.
Specifically, there are two of them, using the codename EV2. Both benchmarks show that the CPU will be an Intel Core i7-1065G7, meaning that it will use Intel"s Ice Lake processors, the same ones that are in the Surface Pro 7 and Surface Laptop 3. Some might have expected Comet Lake, which doesn"t have Iris Plus Graphics and has a more powerful CPU, being that Surface Book has dedicated graphics anyway.
Those dedicated graphics will be Nvidia"s GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q and 1660 Ti Max-Q, assuming that the benchmarks are accurate, as they very well might not be (that"s the thing about leaked benchmarks). This is no surprise, since the 1650 and 1660 are the successors to the 1050 and 1060, the two GPUs currently found in the Surface Book 2. Some had hoped for RTX graphics, but apparently that"s not the case. If Microsoft does the same as it did with the Surface Book 2, the 1650 will be in the 13.5-inch model and the 1660 Ti will be in the 15-inch model.
There really aren"t any surprises here, so there"s no actual reason to doubt the authenticity of the two benchmarks. One thing that"s not clear is which model of the Ice Lake Core i5 will be used, since there are varying levels of Iris Plus Graphics power on the Core i5-1035, and since there were no dedicated graphics on the Core i5 Surface Book 2, the integrated graphics power might actually matter.