Microsoft’s Surface Pro 2 was areasonably well-received update to the original that improved battery life and performance without fundamentally changing its form factor, weight, or other characteristics. Microsoft has rolled out a new hardware update that might make the platform more enticing to customers — a shift to the Core i5-4300U from the Core i5-4200U.
In this case, that 100-point differential hides a lot of changes. The Core i5-4200U is a 1.6GHz base and 2.6GHz Turbo chip, while the Core i5-4300U runs at 1.9GHz base and 2.9GHz Turbo — an increase of 19% at the low end and a still significant 11.5% in Turbo mode. The chip also clocks its GPU 100MHz higher, which should deliver an improvement of 5-7% in gaming applications (clock rate improvements rarely scale linearly).
The Core i5-4300U also supports advanced virtualization functions like Intel’s vPro and VT-d. It includes support for Haswell’s transaction synchronization extensions (TSX), where theCore i5-4200U lacked it. It’s covered by Intel’s Stable Platform Program, which means the chip manufacturer guarantees drivers and support for 15 months. Intel’s Smart Response Technology is also integrated into the Core i5-4300U, though this is less useful since the Surface Pro 2 doesn’t support any form of additional storage. Trusted Execution Technology is also integrated into the new chip, though this typically requires a hardware module integrated into the motherboard and Microsoft has not included such to the best of our knowledge.
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