Luke Larsen / Digital Trends

We ’ve listen a lot about Microsoft ’s newCopilot+ PCsover the preceding few days , but we can ultimately put some hard data to thecompany ’s bluff title . Signal65 , a benchmarking and analysis fellowship , put the unexampled Surface Laptop through its gait , and it absolutely wrack theMacBook Air M3 .

The laptop , equipped with aSnapdragon X Elite C.P.U. , put up impressive resolution across the board , but battery life stand out most . allot to the theme , the Surface Laptop lasted over 21 hours in a local video playback exam . For mention , that ’s close to doubly as long as theSurface Pro 9 , and more than 15 % longer than the MacBook Air M3 .

The Surface Laptop shown in front of a Copilot+ sign.

Luke Larsen / Digital Trends

In peeled performance , the MacBook Air M3 won out in single - core performance in both Cinebench and Geekbench by around 15 % . However , in multi - core performance , the Surface Laptop was upwards of 30 % quicker than the M3 . Even more telling , the Snapdragon X Elite was more than doubly as fast as 12th - gen Intel Core i7 flake , and around 5 % quicker than Intel ’s latest Core Ultra 7 155H.

you may download thefull report from Signal65if you want to dig into the numbers , but there are plenty of interesting comparisons . In a picture encode through Handbrake , for example , the Snapdragon X Elite beat the Apple M3 by close to 25 % .

It ’s significant to point out that this is n’t a review of a Copilot+ PC , though . The report was collect by Ryan Shrout , an demode - Intel employee who ’s now a part of Signal65 , and it was commissioned by Microsoft . caller like Microsoft will often hire a third - company analysis research lab for this sort of performance validation to substantiate its execution claims . That is n’t to say that the report is inaccurate , but just that a across-the-board swath of recap can target more areas of performance .

In the first 24 hours since the new Surface machine launch using the X Elite , and the release of our@Signal_65report analyzing performance and battery life ( you’re able to find it here : https://t.co / Y2wlo6a3lZ ) I've answer a lot of questions around competition with the Mac and the …

& mdash ; Ryan Shrout ( @ryanshrout)May 21 , 2024

Although the report was commission by Microsoft , it ’s not just gassing the Surface Laptop up . One section that ’s particularly interesting concerns emulated execution . Here , Shrout try out apps running through Microsoft ’s new Prism emulation layer against laptops running the same apps natively , and the Surface Laptop does n’t always win .

In Blender , for instance , the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H was around 46 % quicker , while the Apple M3 was 17 % quicker . On the snotty-nosed side , the Snapdragon X Elite make out to match the performance of the Core Ultra 7 155H in Lightroom Classic , despite the Intel chip running a native version of the app .

Prism is a key factor in Copilot+ microcomputer , as it will serve as the fundamentals for apps like Lightroom and Blender that do n’t natively run on the Snapdragon X Elite at this point . Although you ’re not get native performance , this news report at least demo that Prism is doing a mint of oeuvre , and it ’ll hopefully get better with time .

We do n’t have to wait long until we see more independent reviews of Copilot+ PC . The first harvest isavailable for preorder now , and they ’ll unloose on June 18 . By then , we ’ll cognise if these PCs are really as powerful as this report paint a picture .