Under the Hood of Microsoft's Surface 2

By Damon Poeter September 23, 2013

Microsoft's new Surface 2 tablet has some updated hardware under the hood that is tasty enough to give the second-generation slate some pretty hefty performance and battery life boosts over the original Surface RT. Usually, we'd have to wait for the repairability gurus at iFixit.com to train their spudgers on a new device like the Surface 2 before getting a good glance at just what makes it tick. ​The second-generation tablet isn't being released until Oct. 22, but Microsoft has done us the courtesy of passing out its own basic teardown of the Surface 2, so we can get an early look at what's inside. The star of the show, naturally, is the processor—the latest Tegra 4 System-on-a-Chip (SoC) from Nvidia. This next-generation SoC helps to explain how the Surface 2 manages to be faster and slimmer than the Surface RT but still gets 25 percent more battery life, according to Microsoft. The Tegra 4 has a 1.9GHz, quad-core, ARM Cortex-A15 CPU with an additional "battery saver" core, plus 72 custom GPU cores from Nvidia. The graphics chip maker has revved up its latest Tegra offering in a number of ways, including the addition of 4K (UltraHD) support, and the SoC can drive display resolutions of up to 3,200-by-2,000 pixels. Microsoft is touting a 50 percent graphics performance gain for the Surface 2 over its predecessor, and this is where it all starts.

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