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Intel shows off a mysterious and attractive black Surface Book

It may just be a render, but it certainly looks good.

Intel's 8th generation Core processors starring, oddly, a black Surface Book.

To coincide with yesterday's launch of the new 8th-generation processors, which pack four cores and eight threads into the 15W chips found in Ultrabooks, Intel released a sizzle video to give people an idea of what to expect from the new processors.

The star of the video is a little surprising, however. At first glance it looks like a laptop, but MSPoweruser looked a little closer and noticed that it has some very distinctive properties: a vent around the lid and an unusual segmented hinge. The laptop in the video is a Microsoft Surface Book. Only instead of being silver-gray like the current Skylake-based Surface Books, it's black.

The hinge of the Surface Book is rather distinctive.
Enlarge / The hinge of the Surface Book is rather distinctive.
Intel

While Microsoft updated the Surface Pro earlier this year to include a dual-core Kaby Lake processor, the Surface Book—launched simultaneously with the previous generation Surface Pro 4—didn't receive an update. As such, it's now rather long in the tooth. A new version with a quad-core processor and a smart black finish would certainly be a welcome update to the premium system.

Intel is promoting the new chips as "designed for what's coming next," carrying with it the implication that the black Surface Book is part of that wave. However, it's not all good news. Although the video does not give a complete look at the machine, it does appear, at least at first glance, to sport the same connectivity options as the current system: traditional USB Type-A ports, but no sign of USB Type-C or Thunderbolt 3.

At least on the left-hand side, the ports look unchanged, unfortunately.
Enlarge / At least on the left-hand side, the ports look unchanged, unfortunately.
Intel

Of course, it's perfectly possible that there's no black Surface Book and that a video producer thought that a recolored Surface Book just looked cool without appreciating just how distinctive the Surface Book's design is.

Listing image by Intel

Channel Ars Technica