Signal65 has reviewed Microsoft’s newest laptop, the Surface Laptop, equipped with the Snapdragon X Elite SoC, in an article commissioned by Microsoft. In the Surface Laptop context, testing performance against the same performance characteristics of four other devices validated Qualcomm’s claims for benchmarks like thermal performance and battery life.
Ryan Shrout reported in his review that the new Surface laptop offers the Snapdragon X Elite with strong AI facilities and a long time out of battery. Moreover, the CPU performance was impressive, outpacing Intel’s Meteor Lake processors and even the Apple M3 silicon at times. Thermal performance was also decent, with relatively low runoff temperatures.
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The review also contrasted the new Surface Laptop to the Surface Laptop 5 Alder Lake Core i7-1255U, Surface Pro 9 SQ3 silicon, MSI Prestige 16 AI EVO Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 155H, and Apple’s MacBook Air 15 M3 silicon. Snapdragon X Elite’s hotspot in Cinebench 2024 multi-threaded tests was 50.3°C, whereas MSI’s was 56.2°C, MacBook Air’s was 45.8°C, and the previous Surface’s was 47.1°C. For single-threaded assignments, laptops showed a 37.4°C hotspot draw for X Elite next to MacBook Air’s 35.1°C but superior to the MSI’s 41.3°C and Surface 5’s 44.1°C.
X Elite’s battery life tests were equally impressive. When it came to regional video playback, the X Elite lasted longer than any other laptop by a long shot. The MacBook Air was the slowest at 16%, while the MSI was at 25%, the Surface Pro 9 SQ3 was at 44%, and the Surface 5 was at 58 percent. In the Procyon productivity test, the Meteor Lake chip was 10% behind Type, the Surface Pro 9 was 32% behind, and the Surface 5 was 41% behind.
The MacBook Air had the same battery life in this evaluation, according to Signal65. Benchmark tests like the Cinebench and Geekbench showed that the X Elite was exceptional at multi-threaded activities, while the M3 from Apple was the best at single-threaded activities. AI workloads were the Snapdragon X Elite’s strength, and with the help of the 45Teraops NPU, it had double the M3’s performance and three times that of the Core Ultra 7 155H.
The combination of Windows 11 on ARM’s new Prism translation and emulation processes brought the performance closer to the SQ3 and Alder Lake chips and tied the Core Ultra 7 in a few tests. The overall graphics performance was fantastic, with the Snapdragon X Elite having close to double the performance of Alder Lake and SQ3, barely falling behind Meteor Lake’s integrated Arc Graphics and the M3 in the majority of 3DMark tests. However, since this was a review commissioned by Qualcomm, the outcomes might be slightly exaggerated.
