The next generation Surface Pro upgrade might be delayed based on the timeline for Intel’s 7th Gen processors

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) may be positioning itself to delay the next generation Surface Pro to be able to offer better hardware gains for the end user. Should a Surface tablet emerge in June, it is not expected to be able to take advantage of the next generation Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) Polaris Architecture or Nvidia Corporation’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) Pascal, which should essentially make the Surface Pro series a much more gaming-oriented, or at the very least, productivity-related, as GPUs get more integrated into computing solutions.

Given the fact that the Surface Pro lineup is more or less Microsoft’s most premium offering a laptop-tablet hybrid, it is not unnatural to assume that the Redmond-based tech giant will want to harness the much more powerful and power efficient solutions that AMD and Nvidia offer.

Intel’s CPU refresh via Kaby Lake is a crucial aspect of the upgrade. It is expected to provide a small boost to the mobility CPUs that power the Surface lineup and a much larger integrated Graphics Processing Unit (iGPU) boost, to boot especially in the low end variants of the Surface Pro. Kaby Lake is already being pushed out by other market entrants such as Asus which, according to a blog post by Microsoft is pushing out a new lineup which includes its Transformer 3 tablet that takes several design cues from the incumbent Surface Pro 4.

Kaby Lake is also a crucial gamechanger for Microsoft as the software giant is essentially not expected to support any other OS but Windows 10 for the CPU architecture, a marked movement away from the software giant’s normal commitment to ensuring that new hardware would always have native support on platforms that were released more than a decade ago at times (Windows XP). Kaby Lake is expected to face off against AMD’s Zen microarchitecture, that will also harness its APU lineup to potentially bring the first reach challenge to Intel this decade.

The above information does bring some credibility to reports that Microsoft may have delayed the Surface Pro lineup altogether for a Q3 launch, something that could explain the launch window of the Transformer 3 tablet as well. In addition to this, Microsoft would be hard pressed to push out the Surface Lineup at a time when there are no significant hardware upgrades out and Pascal, Polaris and Kaby Lake could, once they have mobile solutions essentially making Microsoft’s offerings outdated within a few months of their release.

It is, therefore, a very simple logical deduction that if Microsoft wishes to offer anything tangible in terms of a hardware upgrade to its consumers, the Redmond-based tech giant will essentially see itself delay its Surface lineup to the 3rd quarter of 2016.