Microsoft's new Surface laptops will be available with Arm CPUs in June

Microsoft's Surface line of laptops is getting updated in the coming months and aside from the addition of OLED display tech, the big news is optional Arm variants of the new portable PCs. Windows Central reports that both the Surface Pro 10 tablet and the Surface Laptop will be updated later this month with Intel's Meteor Lake CPUs. The Surface Pro 10 will also get an OLED screen.

However, the really radical revision comes in June when both products will be offered with  Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite Arm CPU. It will be the first time that the Surface Laptop has been offered with an Arm chip.

As we've highlighted previously, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is being pitched as the first truly high-performance Arm CPU for Windows PCs. Apple has proved that Arm-based CPUs can compete with traditional x86 chips from Intel and AMD for raw performance. But existing Arm chips in Windows devices have been based on ultra-low power CPU core designs that haven't expressly been designed to offer desktop-class performance.

In theory, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chip changes that courtesy of 12 high-performance Arm cores and performance that's claimed to be in the same rough ballpark as both Apple silicon and the latest x86 CPUs for laptops.

Whether Intel or Arm, the new portables are expected to bring dramatic improvements in battery life, with true all-day operation possible. The Surface Laptop is also said to be subject to an extensive design overhaul with slimmer screen bezels, a haptic touchpad, improved port selection including a pair of USB-C sockets, and, inevitably, the addition of Microsoft's dedicated Copilot button on the keyboard.

Of course, Microsoft's Surface machines won't be the only devices to get the new Qualcomm chip. A whole raft of new Windows laptops with the new CPU are expected to arrive this year. 

One such device looks set to be a laptop from Lenovo which has popped up in the Geekbench results database. Registered as the Lenovo 83ED, it has logged