All of Microsoft’s benchmarks for the MacBook Air exceed

Microsoft is on a mission to topple the MacBook Air with its new Copilot Plus series of computers. He’s so confident he’s finally gotten Windows on Arm right that he spent an entire day pitting his new Surface Laptop against a MacBook Air at his headquarters in Redmond, Wash., last month. The Verge a number of real-world benchmarks and simulated tests are shown to demonstrate the new Qualcomm-powered Surface Laptop beating Apple’s best-selling laptop.

While I previously talked about Microsoft’s confidence in beating Apple’s M3 processor, I thought it would be useful to examine all the benchmark claims and battery life estimates in detail. Microsoft touched on some of these during last week’s Surface and Windows AI event, but the claims on stage weren’t always as detailed as Microsoft employees showed me last month.

I wasn’t able to run the benchmarks myself, but the results should serve as an important data point as we approach the launch of these Copilot Plus computers on June 18th. It’s also important to note that, unlike Apple’s MacBook Air, Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop isn’t fanless, allowing it to squeeze out more performance. Microsoft only compared its Surface Laptop to the MacBook Air M3 – not the MacBook Pro, which comes equipped with fans.

Benchmarks aren’t everything, though, and we’ll get a better idea of ​​actual real-world performance and battery life when we review the Surface Laptop next month.

Microsoft kicked off benchmark day with the first raw performance measurement between the Surface Laptop and the MacBook Air M3. It showed two benchmark claims, including sustainable performance using the Cinebench 2024 multi-threaded workload and peak performance using the Geekbench 6 multi-threaded test.

The Surface Laptop achieved a score of 980 in Cinebench 2024 multithreaded and a score of 14,000 in Geekbench 6 multithreaded. Microsoft avoided highlighting the single-threaded results of both benchmarks, presumably because the MacBook Air would have scored slightly better here.

Either way, Microsoft claims its new Surface Laptop will beat the MacBook Air M3 in Cinebench multi-threaded workloads by 50 percent. In Geekbench 6, the Surface Laptop is only 16 percent better. On stage last week, Microsoft also claimed that its Copilot Plus PC offering will be “58 percent faster than the MacBook Air M3.”

Next, Microsoft covered what it describes as “real-world performance.” The main test here was the HandBrake ToS benchmark, which measures how long it takes to encode a 4K video file. The Surface Laptop with Snapdragon X Elite did it in five minutes and eight seconds, faster than the six minutes and 26 seconds it took the MacBook Air M3.

More importantly, this was twice as fast as the Surface Laptop 5 running a 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake CPU, which took 10 minutes and 30 seconds to complete the task. The Surface Laptop 4 took even longer, 13 minutes and 32 seconds.

Microsoft’s comparisons with the MacBook Air M3 are also about battery life. During tests, I saw Microsoft simulate battery life while browsing the web and playing videos. Microsoft uses a script to simulate web browsing. On the 2022 Intel-based Surface Laptop 5, it took eight hours and 38 minutes to completely drain the battery; the new Surface Laptop lasted twice as long, reaching 16 hours and 56 minutes. That’s better than the same test on the 15-inch MacBook Air M3, which lasted 15 hours and 25 minutes.

Microsoft conducted a similar test for video playback, which showed the Surface Laptop lasting more than 20 hours, while the MacBook Air M3 reached 17 hours, 45 minutes. That’s also nearly eight hours more than the Surface Laptop 5, which lasted 12 hours and 30 minutes.

Microsoft claimed on stage last week that the new Copilot Plus computers with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor will offer “20 percent longer battery life than the latest 15-inch MacBook Air.”

The final benchmarks that Microsoft showed me were about NPU performance. Microsoft claims that the NPU inside the Snapdragon X Elite is nearly twice as fast in AI acceleration tasks as Apple’s M3 Neural Engine on the Procyon AI Computer Vision cross-platform benchmark.

The Surface Laptop scored 1,745 on the Procyon AI Score, while the MacBook Air scored 889. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite has 45 TOPS of AI acceleration performance, much higher than the M3’s 18 TOPS.

Microsoft also demonstrated a Surface Laptop that achieves 4.5x higher inference efficiency for high-speed Phi Silica processing than the M3, with 24 TOPS/watt peak inference efficiency.