Category: Hardware

December 2021 firmware updates are now available for the Intel-based Surface Laptop 4 and the second-gen Surface Studio.

At the beginning of this year, Microsoft announced Surface Pro 7 Plus—a business-oriented Surface Pro 7 with the latest processors from Intel. The newest update for Surface Pro 7 Plus equips the device with several new features and noticeable improvements.

Microsoft prepared a new set of patches for its most affordable Surface laptop. December 2021 firmware update for Surface Laptop Go brings new drivers, stability improvements, bug fixes, and battery optimizations.

Kaby Lake G, released in 2018, is one of the weirdest modern processors from Intel. In a nutshell, Kaby Lake G is a quirky fusion of two rivaling camps: Intel and AMD. The product offers a mobile 8th gen CPU from Intel and the RX Vega M graphics from AMD. The idea behind the project was to provide gamers with a CPU that sports significantly more powerful graphics than standard iGPU in Intel processors of that time.

Three years ago, Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon 8cx processor for laptops running Windows on ARM. After that, the progress in this field was not impressive. There are a few versions of Snapdragon 8cx over the years, including the Microsoft S1, SQ2, and Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2. Those were just a tweaked chip with slightly higher clock speeds.

An engineering sample of a Lenovo QRD laptop powered by an ARM Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 processor has been spotted in Geekbench database. Thanks to this new info, we can now see what performance Windows 11 on ARM devices can offer.

November 2021 firmware update roundup for Surface devices continues with more computers from Microsoft getting fresh patches and bug fixes. This time, Surface Pro 8 receives its first-ever firmware, plus security updates arrive for Surface Book 2 and Surface Laptop 2.

XDA reports that Qualcomm has an exclusive agreement with Microsoft for Windows on ARM, made several years ago. Due to that agreement, all devices running this version of the popular OS are only based on Snapdragon chips. One more interesting thing is the agreement is expiring very soon.

Microsoft has announced the November November firmware update for Xbox consoles, available for both the Xbox Series X and S and the entire Xbox One family. It includes new color filters, improved audio output, reduced input lag and Bluetooth Low Energy support for older controllers.

Earlier this month, Microsoft released November 2021 firmware update for the first-gen Surface Duo. As with many previous updates, this month's release contained nothing but general Android security patches without device-specific improvements or bug fixes. Now the same update is available for the second-gen Surface Duo, released in September 2021. And "the same" means literally the same—only Android security updates.