That’s nothing to sneeze at. The Surface Laptop 3 featured the Ryzen 7 3780U and the Ryzen 5 3850U. Both were quad-core parts. The Ryzen 5 4680U and the Ryzen 7 4980U featured in the Surface Laptop 4 are 6- and 8-core Ryzen processors, respectively. Performance will likely increase sharply just from the added core count.
The fact that these are Surface Edition chips is meaningful, too. AMD and Microsoft’s original Surface Edition partnership (the Ryzen 7 3780U and the Ryzen 5 3850U for the Surface Laptop 3) produced semi-custom parts that tweaked the existing Ryzen architecture and added numerous features, from extra compute units and better responsiveness, to an on-die pen controller and more. “When looking for the right processor to power the all new Microsoft Surface Laptop 3, we wanted the best graphics performance in a single processor,” Microsoft distinguished engineer Pavan Davuluri said in a news release at the time.