Alleged Surface Studio 2 benchmarks leak, and I sure hope they’re not real

Remember the Surface Studio? It’s arguably the coolest computer Microsoft’s built, but nearly two years after launch, its specs feel stale. In fact, the device already felt pretty under-powered back in 2016 due to its choice of some mobile components and a last-gen graphics card.

That’s why it’s pretty disappointing to see supposed benchmarks of its successor aren’t indicating the performance bump we were hoping for. Windows Latest noticed a Surface Studio 2 appeared on Geekbench yesterday, sporting a last-generation i7-7820HQ processor coupled with 32 GB of RAM.

The 7820HQ was launched in early 2017. For comparison’s sake, it’s only about 8 percent faster than the 6820HQ in the original Surface Studio. Sometimes processors don’t improve much between generations, but the apparent choice is odd because Intel made a significant leap with its 8th-generation chips this year.

Intel has added two cores to most of its processor lines,  yielding significant performance gains especially in multi-threaded operations. Where the i7-7820HQ achieves around 4,600/16,000 single-core and multi-core scores in Geekbench 4, this year’s i7-8850H manages around 5,000/22,000.

That said, take this all with a grain of salt. There will likely be other configurations – though it would be odd to mix-and-match processor generations – and this wouldn’t be the first time leaked benchmarks turn out to be wrong. I sure hope that’s the case this time around, but we’ll likely find out more come October 2.