KITA

An early review is quite positive for both the Surface Laptop and the latest version of Windows on Arm:

https://signal65.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/NewSurfaceLaptop2024_Signal65LabInsights.pdf

It's best to read it, but here are a few highlights:

Scores shown for the M3 MacBook Air 15" relative to that of the Surface Laptop 15" (Surface Laptop = 1.00x)

CPU Single Thread: 1.15x~1.17x
CPU Multi Thread: 0.70x~0.85x
NPU Performance: 0.52x
GPU Performance: 1.29x~1.31x
Battery Life: 0.84x

"The Surface division has always seen its primary competition as the Mac, and the new Surface Laptop and the new Surface Pro tablet absolutely position the Windows ecosystem stiffly against the MacBook line. Microsoft knew that the Snapdragon X Elite and its Arm-based architecture was a pivotal part of its strategy against the Mac, both with high performance Oryon cores and an innovative NPU AI accelerator built in. The M3 is still a great chip, but the new Surface Laptop offers an amazing build quality and physical design, innovative new AI experiences that Mac hasn’t started to compete with yet, and does it all for $200 less than an equivalent MacBook Air.

Microsoft and the Surface group have created the most impressive new laptop to hit the PC market in a long time. The new Surface Laptop is managing to combine a new processor architecture, an updated emulation layer for Windows on Arm, the new highest performance PC processor for this class of laptop, an OS paradigm shift to AI, and one of the best physical keyboard and trackpad designs into a single package. It manages to be both unique and innovative but also familiar and comfortable for the modern consumer."

For anyone looking for actual benchmarks from a 3rd party:

https://signal65.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/NewSurfaceLaptop2024_Signal65LabInsights.pdf

It's best to read it, but here are a few highlights:

Scores shown for the MacBook Air 15" relative to that of the Surface Laptop 15" (Surface Laptop = 1.00x)

CPU Single Thread: 1.15x~1.17x
CPU Multi Thread: 0.70x~0.85x
NPU Performance: 0.52x
GPU Performance: 1.29x~1.31x
Battery Life: 0.84x

"The Surface division has always seen its primary competition as the Mac, and the new Surface Laptop and the new Surface Pro tablet absolutely position the Windows ecosystem stiffly against the MacBook line. Microsoft knew that the Snapdragon X Elite and its Arm-based architecture was a pivotal part of its strategy against the Mac, both with high performance Oryon cores and an innovative NPU AI accelerator built in. The M3 is still a great chip, but the new Surface Laptop offers an amazing build quality and physical design, innovative new AI experiences that Mac hasn’t started to compete with yet, and does it all for $200 less than an equivalent MacBook Air.

Microsoft and the Surface group have created the most impressive new laptop to hit the PC market in a long time. The new Surface Laptop is managing to combine a new processor architecture, an updated emulation layer for Windows on Arm, the new highest performance PC processor for this class of laptop, an OS paradigm shift to AI, and one of the best physical keyboard and trackpad designs into a single package. It manages to be both unique and innovative but also familiar and comfortable for the modern consumer."

foregoneconclusion said:

KITA said:

y2an said:

Given the Surface has a fan, why compare it to the MacBook Airs rather than the MacBook Pros?

Surface Laptop 15" is $1299 for Snapdragon X Elite with 16 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD

MacBook Air 15" is $1299 for M3 with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD

Microsoft doesn't mention unified memory in its marketing, so it could be DDR for the Surface which is approximately 50% as efficient as unified memory. If so, the RAM difference in this comparison is negligible. I also wonder what the SSD speed is for the Surface. The M3 MBA SSD has a read speed of 2880 and a write speed of 2108. 

8 GB of RAM is still 8 GB of RAM.



The NPU may take 8 GB of RAM just for itself at times. 16 GB was chosen as the minimum for a reason.

saarek said:

“AI computer showdown”. 

So which one of them is actually better at processing ML/AI? Surely that should be the primary focus based on the title?

On paper, for the NPU performance of each SoC:

Snapdragon X Plus - 45 TOPS (INT8)
Snapdragon X Elite - 45 TOPS (INT8)
Apple M3 - 18 TOPS (FP16)
Apple M4 - 38 TOPS (INT8)

y2an said:

Given the Surface has a fan, why compare it to the MacBook Airs rather than the MacBook Pros?

Surface Laptop 15" is $1299 for Snapdragon X Elite with 16 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD

MacBook Air 15" is $1299 for M3 with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD

MacBook Pro 16" is $2499 for M3 Pro with 18 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD

-

Surface Laptop 13" is $999 for Snapdragon X Plus with 16 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD

Macbook Air 13" is $1099 for M3 with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD

Macbook Pro 14" is $1599 for M3 with 8 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD