Microsoft Corp CEO Steve Ballmer boasted about how his company was going to set a "new standard" for first-party hardware. That certainly appears to be the case if its rumored Surface tablet hardware upgrade proves true.
According regular Microsoft leaker MS_Nerd, whose Twitter post was picked up by NeoWin, Microsoft is planning to upgrade the Surface family as follows:
Surface RT 2:
+ 8.6-inch display
+ Qualcomm SoC/chipset (likely Snapdragon 5)
Surface Pro
+11.6-inch display
+ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) Temash chip (reportedly a 28 nm successor to Hondo)
Surface Book
+14.6-inch display
+Intel 22 nm Haswell chip
Surface RT (gen. 1)
Both Haswell and Temash are slated to launch around mid-2013. Given that and the fact that the Surface Pro (first-generation) still hasn't launched, it sounds like Microsoft is not planning to roll out this upgrade for at least another year. However, if it does embrace this ambitious upgrade, it could definitely live up to its lofty self-set goals hardware wise.
