Surface 3 also includes two improved cameras: a 3.5 megapixel 1080p front-facing camera and an 8 megapixel 1080p rear-facing camera with auto-focus.
Look inside Surface 3 and you’ll find Intel’s latest mobile system on a chip (SoC) design, the “Cherry Trail” Atom x7. Indeed, Surface 3 will be the first PC to ship with this design, and Meinhardt told me it provides some important improvements over the Core M chips we’re starting to see on other ultraportable tablets and laptops.
First, don’t be alarmed by the Atom brand: the Atom x7 is a “very performant” CPU, I was told, and I was promised I’d be surprised by the snappy performance. It offers stellar battery life—a problem with Core M—and because it’s so tiny the system can be even thinner and lighter than what’s possible with Core M. It’s also completely fanless, a huge plus. Overall, Microsoft promises over 10 hours of battery life for video-playback.
From a specs perspective, what we’re looking at is a quad-core 1.6 GHz Atom x7-Z8700 processor with 2 MB of cache, and support for Intel Burst up to 2.4 GHz. The system is also powered by 2 GB or 4 GB of RAM and either 64 GB or 128 GB of SSD storage, depending on the model. (Pricing is discussed below.) Surface 3 also sports Wi-Fi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0 LE, and an LTE version will be offered too.
