Bad news for those hoping to see an AMD Ryzen 5000 series chip in Microsoft's Surface Laptop 4. According to a list of leaked benchmarks, the laptop will instead be powered by an older Ryzen 7 4000 series processor.

This is obviously very disappointing news for those looking forward to Microsoft's upcoming laptop. Because it means that the laptops will be powered by older chipsets instead of the latest AMD silicon.

The UserBenchmark list was first spotted by Twitter user @TUM_APISAK. The listing shows a Surface machine with a Ryzen 7 with a base clock of 2 GHz and a turbo speed of 3.75 GHz. The chip is powered by a Radeon RX Vega 8 GPU.

This looks a lot like the 4000 series and not the 5000 series, which promises clock speeds of 3.4-4.9 GHz. Therefore, one cannot help but feel a little disappointed that the Surface Laptop 4 may not get this speed boost.

By comparison, the Intel specs for the Surface Laptop 4 will include a Tiger Lake-U CPU; putting a new chip in one Intel laptop and an older AMD chip in the other seems like a rather odd decision It seems to me.

Of course, as previously mentioned, Microsoft may be sourcing custom-made chips from AMD. Previous benchmark scores have shown that the 4000 series APUs have higher clock speeds and extra compute units that would not normally be found.

The fact that the benchmark listings refer to this chip as a Ryzen 7 "Microsoft Surface Edition" would support that idea. Or so it appears from the outside. In other words, there is no telling what these chips can do without the latest model.

In addition to this, the listing states that the laptop will have 16 GB of RAM, which would mean that the Surface Laptop 4 will have enough RAM to complement the CPU. However, nothing is finalized until it is finalized, and Microsoft may surprise us by announcing a machine that is very different from what the benchmarks suggest.

Unfortunately, we don't know when the Surface Laptop 4 will be announced. For now, all we can do is speculate, but we would not be surprised if Microsoft announces a new Surface Laptop later this spring.