The mission to take down the MacBook Air is being headed by Microsoft

Microsoft is Going to Win the Most Powerful Laptop Ever: From Geekbench to Google, Browsers, and Compatibility Benchmarks

There aren’t that many exciting benchmark tests to watch. For the past several years, the MacBook Air has been able to smoke Arm-powered PC chips, too. The Surface was in command on the first test. Then it won another test and another after that. The results of these tests are why Microsoft believes it’s now in position to conquer the laptop market.

On a recent morning at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft representatives set out new Surface devices equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips inside and compared them directly to Apple’s category-leading laptop. I witnessed an hour of demos and benchmarks that started with Geekbench and Cinebench comparisons, then moved on to apps and compatibility.

These Copilot Plus PCs are equipped with a neural processing unit (NPU) from Qualcomm that hits 45 TOPS of compute for AI tasks. It results in more artificial intelligence work per watt than both the MacBook Air M3 and the RTX 4060.

“You’re going to have the most powerful PC ever,” says Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, during the briefing. It is going to perform better than any MacBook Air with an M3 processor, by over 50 percent on sustained performance.

We haven’t had the high ground on having the most performant device in over two decades. Mehdi says that they are going to have that.

One of the big advancements is an improved emulator called Prism, which Microsoft claims is as efficient as Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation layer and can emulate apps twice as fast as the previous generation of Windows on Arm devices.

Two major shifts have happened in the last few years. Many of the biggest apps now support native Arm chips, with the exception of Vype and Prime which are no longer native. Second, Google and many other browser makers are moving to ARM64. A native version of Chrome launched recently, followed by Opera just last week. You don’t have to lose performance in any browser if you are wearing an ARM64 native one. That’s a big deal when you consider a lot of apps are web-based now and that we spend more time than ever inside a browser.

87 percent of the total app minutes spent on the Copilot Plus PCs will be inside native apps, according to Microsoft. It’s still working on closing that other 13 percent, but the Prism emulator will help in the meantime.

The Macbook Air M3 reached over 17 hours in a test, as well as the Surface Copilot Plus PC, which hit more than 20 hours. That is also more than the Surface Laptop 5, which only lasted a little over 12 hours. This will be a significant improvement for Windows laptops if those battery gains extend beyond basic web browsing and video viewing.

More than 40 models are being integrated directly into Windows on Arm to enable new experiences for app developers. There are around 10 models that run in the background. Microsoft’s battery life measurement shows that the models run on the NPU continuously, meaning that they will allow developers to bring AI directly into their apps.

Davuluri says the new possibilities for artificial intelligence are open thanks to these. NPU give us the ability to do high performance work. Microsoft demonstrated its new Recall feature onstage today, which essentially allows you to time travel back to something you saw on your PC or were working on. The models run in the background and you can see a timelines of everything you’re working on.

Live translations of any video will be provided by the LiveCaptions feature of Windows 11. Microsoft is also adding Auto Super Resolution to Windows 11, which automatically upscales games to improve frame rates and graphics resolution.

Surface Laptops with all-new “AI” capabilities: the announcement of two new, fully redesigned ARM-based Surface laptops

It announced two new, fully redesigned ARM-based Surface laptops powered by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X processors, with all-new “AI” capabilities, a phrase you’ll hear many PC manufacturers repeat over the next few years. The Surface Laptop (7th Edition) and the Surface Pro (11th Edition) are new to you. They both start at $1,000 and are available for preorder. On June 18 you will be able to buy both of them.