Microsoft is testing new Surface RT tablets with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset. This new model is expected to arrive towards the end of the year. Bloomberg claims that Microsoft will update the tablet with new chips from Qualcomm, while NVIDIA will "continue as a supplier for some versions", presumably including the existing model with its Tegra 3 chipset.

eanwhile, The Verge is citing separate "sources familiar to Microsoft's Surface plans", stating that a Windows RT 8.1 Surface device is already in testing at Microsoft, powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset. The report accurately states that the ARM-based chip has integrated LTE radios, but it's unclear at this stage whether a future Surface will come with mobile broadband capabilities.

Meanwhile benchmarks are showing up of Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 800 SoC. This chip features four Krait 400 CPU cores and the Adreno 330 GPU, making it one of the faster SoCs in the market. Power consumption is still somewhat of a mystery though, although Qualcomm claims it's on-par with that of the Snapdragon 600 thanks to the use of the TSMC 28nm High Performance for Mobile (HPm) process instead of the 28nm Low Power (LP) process. As you can see here, the Snapdragon 800 comes within spitting distance of the four ARM Cortex-A15 CPU cores used in the Tegra 4, though it can't quite beat it (and the difference would become more pronounced if the two were running at the same clock speed). The GPU, on the other hand, is even quicker than Tegra 4 or the iPad 4. This is no small feat, given that Tegra 4 tablets aren't quite on the market yet and Apple has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to graphics performance.

Microsoft works on Surface RT with Snapdragon 800