A Modern AI PC Design
Introducing the future of Windows and Copilot+ PC
with the new Surface Laptop and Snapdragon X Elite.
Ryan Shrout

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Contents
3

Introduction

18

Media Processing

4

The New Surface Systems

19

Modern Web Performance

6

Competitive Landscape20

Productivity

8Physical System Analysis

22

Graphics Performance

11

Battery Life

24

Emulation Performance

13

Performance Bounding

26

Signal Through the Noise

16

Modern AI Performance

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Introduction
It is the culmination of morethan four years of research anddevelopment

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A Vision for AI on the PC

Surface Supports the Vision

What We CoverSince the launch of the first Surface back in
2012, Microsoft’s devices group has beenworking towards a vision. This theoreticalend state is one where there is a merger
between hardware and software, not at theexpense of other system OEMs or partners,
but as a beacon and directional guidance
for the entire industry. We have seen 10+
years of iteration, with some significant
changes and advancements in design andintegration, and some other years of modest
and iterative change.

The new Surface Laptop, and the new
Surface Pro, based on the Qualcomm
Snapdragon X Elite SoC, is Microsoft’s
attempt to get all the pieces together andready for the shift that AI is bringing to
the personal computer. In practical terms
this translates into an elevated level of
performance, one that is complemented
by power efficiency rather than burdened.
It also means a new emphasis on a third
player in the computing IP space: the Neural
Processing Unit (NPU).

This paper will highlight the performanceand advanced capabilities of the new
Surface Laptop, the 15” model. It is not a
deep dive into the drastic changes to the
Windows operating system that are coming
later this year; that will be an investigation
for another time.

In 2024, it’s clear that Microsoft is beginningto turn the page to a very different kindof Windows operating system and withit comes the need for a different kind ofcomputing hardware. It calls this new classof computer the “Copilot+ PC” and it is
the culmination of more than four years of
research and development, coming together
as a combination of new operating systemfundamentals and hardware requirements toenable a new class of consumer experience.

The NPU is now a first-class citizen to both
the CPU and the GPU in PCs. And the NPU
that is part of the X Elite platform from
Qualcomm is the most power efficient andperformant on the market today.

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The New Surface Systems
The new Surface devices looks like many other laptops on the market, and you’d be hard pressed to
notice a difference between it and the Surface Laptop 5 that has been shipping for nearly two years.
But under the hood are some big changes.

Hardware Specs• Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and X
Plus processor• Up to 12 high performance cores• 45 TOPS NPU• Tablet, 13” and 15” laptop designs• 16-32GB system memory• 256GB-1TB PCIe storage• Wi-Fi 7 / Bluetooth 5.2

There are multiple Copilot+ PC Surface devices
that are launching today, including the 15” laptopthat is used for this study, but also a 13” laptop
form factor and a 13” tablet & kickstand designthat has become a staple of the Surface lineup.
The heart of the new Surface Laptop is the
Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor, abrand-new offering from the San Diego siliconcompany that was announced back in Octoberof 2023. It features a 12-core Oryon architecture
CPU, a powerful Adreno integrated GPU, and a
Hexagon NPU.
The Oryon CPU architecture turns out to be
one of the X Elite and new Surface Laptop

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secret weapons, offering performance at or
above any other PC processors on the market.
The cores are organized as three blocks of fourcores each and run at 3.8 GHz, two of which arecapable of boosting up to 4.2 GHz for additional
performance in lightly threaded workloads.
The GPU offers up to 4.6 TFLOPS of peak
performance that can be utilized for graphics
and gaming workloads but also for any AI andcontent creation functions that might utilize a
GPU-first design.

anything else available in-market today. And
it does this while running at very lower power
consumption, a characteristic that Microsoft
believes is critical for the acceptance of AI
functionality in PCs.
Our system under test includes 16GB of memory,the minimum to be considered a Copilot+ PC,
and a 1TB integrated solid state drive for storage.

The Hexagon NPU is incredibly fast, providing
up to 45 TOPS (tera operations per second) of
AI throughput, a noticeable 4x increase over4

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The New Surface Systems
DesignScreenConnectivity

Our focus today is on performance andfunctionality, but it is worth noting that thedesign of the new Surface Laptop is superb, builtwith an aluminum body, and presents itself asa premium, high-quality laptop that would be amatch or best any other laptop on the market.

Like all the Microsoft Surface computers, thisSurface Laptop has a gorgeous screen that
supports multi-touch. The 15” high resolution
2496x1664 screen looks amazing watching video
content but also while getting productivity work
done in bright office spaces.

It has two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the lefthand side of the device, a USB Type-A on theleft, a Surface dock connector on the right that
supports both power input and data connectivity,
and an SD memory card reader. Microsoft choseto integrate the Qualcomm Fast Connect 7800
chip that adds support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth.

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The Oryon CPU architecture
turns out to be one of the
X Elite and new Surface
Laptop secret weapons5

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Competitive
LandscapeTo best understand the performance landscape that the new
Snapdragon X Elite processor and new Surface Laptop arecompeting in 2024, we selected a handful of other devices tomeasure and compare.

First, it made the most sense to lookat the previous generation Surface
Laptop 5 using the highest end CPU
configuration at the time, the Intel
12th Gen Core i7 processor. This
provides us with a clear generationto-generation uplift data set.
Next, we wanted to include thelatest and most relevant Windows
competitive solutions, and thosetoday are based on Intel’s Core Ultra
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processors, previously codenamed
Meteor Lake. For that we used the
MSI Prestige 16 EVO AI laptop that
includes the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H
with integrated Arc graphics.
Finally, the Apple MacBook Air
powered by the M3 processor isoften considered one of, if not the,best and most premium PC on themarket. Given that status and that
the M3 chip is based on a similar

Arm architecture as the Snapdragon
X Elite, this gives us a greatcomparative data set. (Obviously
there are going to be some
applications and workloads that are
not available cross-OS, so we’ll pointout those areas where they occur.)*In 15” configuration and alike memory and storage
configurations.

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Competitive LandscapeThis paper is focused on performance and platform

Core Ultra 7 processor family can vary in pricing drasticallycompared to much of the Windows laptop ecosystem. One

capabilities, but a consideration around price is also

depending on OEM, screen configurations and more, butof the questions we hope to answer with today’s testing is if

warranted. The new Surface Laptop configured with thethe unit we tested for this paper with 16GB of memory andthat price delta is warranted for consumers.

Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100, 16GB of memory and 1TB

512GB of storage is selling today for $1499.

of storage will run you $1699. For comparison, the Apple
15” MacBook Air with 16GB of memory and 1TB of storage
costs $1899 as we write this. Systems based on the IntelIt’s fair to say that the new Microsoft Surface Laptop isa premium machine, both in terms of price and design,

The new Surface
Laptop is $200 cheaper
than the MacBook Air*
Full system specifications and testing details are included at
the end of this report in the appendix.

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Thermal Performance (Cinebench 2024 Multi-thread)
In what we can generally consider

Physical
SystemAnalysisa worst case scenario, under a fully
loaded system for 10 minutes to saturate
the cooling solution, the new Surface
Laptop with the Snapdragon X Elite
performs well in our testing. The hottest
temperatures (50.3C) are seen at thehinge between the screen and the
keyboard, away from the hands of theuser. The Surface Laptop 5 using the Intel
Core i7 CPU is slightly cooler at 47C but
the heat is centralized more over the left

Physical and technicalcharacteristics analysis.

hand side of the keyboard.

The New Surface Laptop (Snapdragon X Elite)

Surface Laptop 5 (Intel 12th Gen Core i7)

Thermal Performance
Under Load

The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H poweredby system from MSI proved to be thehottest (and as you’ll see in the next

Thermal performance testing forthis report was conducted using theFLIR C5 Thermal Imaging Camera.
Temperatures were measured
in a 72°F ambient room using a
10-minute run of Cinebench 2024 tosaturate the cooling solutions.

section, the loudest), getting up to
56.2C right dead center in the device.
You can see the exhaust fans working to
expel the heat out the left-hand side. Of
course, there is a wide range of systemdesigns using the Intel Meteor Lake
CPUs so this result is only representativeof one particular integration. The
MacBook Air is the coolest system but
sacrifices performance.

Apple MacBook Air (Apple M3)
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MSI Prestige 16 EVO AI (Intel Core Ultra 7 155H)
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Thermal Performance (Cinebench 2024 Single Thread)

Physical System Analysis

Testing the thermals in a more standard
workload environment paints the new
X Elite SoC in a great light, with thesystem only hitting 37.4C. In contrast,
the 12th Gen Core i7 Laptop 5 systemstill gets to 44.1C. The MSI-built Core
Ultra platform is cool at just 41C but
does so at the expense of noise (asnoted on the next page).

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The New Surface Laptop (Snapdragon X Elite)

Surface Laptop 5 (Intel 12th Gen Core i7)

Apple MacBook Air (Apple M3)

MSI Prestige 16 EVO AI (Intel Core Ultra 7 155H)
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Physical System Analysis
Sound and Fan Noise
Secondary to the thermal performance of any notebook design is the resulting fan
speeds and noise that can be traded off for temperature. We measured noise of these
laptops in a quiet, but standard working environment from a distance of 18 inches.

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Both the new Surface Laptop and the Laptop 5 showed

In more standard workloads, where the system is loading

similar sound levels in our testing under the heavy, consistent

only a single thread, the new Surface Laptop and the X Elite

workload, coming in at just over 33 dbA. The MSI Intel CoreCPU are incredibly quiet, just above the noise floor at 26.3

Ultra system fans were running noticeably louder, hitting 39.5

dbA. The previous generation Laptop 5 is a bit louder, cross-dbA in our measurement. The SQ3-based Surface Pro 9 5G

ing the 28 dbA level. The MSI system with the Intel Core Ultraand MacBook Air are fanless, and thus, don’t measure aboveis just as loud in this testing as when fully loaded, despite

our office sound floor.

being 15C cooler in our thermal imaging.

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Battery Life
Understanding real-world battery life scenarios.
Local Video Playback
Our in-house local video playback battery life test
evaluates the machines in like-for-like configurations
including 150 nit screen brightness, wireless connectivity
disabled, and looped H.264 video content.

Our results on this show that the new Surface Laptop powered by
the Snapdragon X Elite has the longest battery life of any system
we have tested. Usable video playback time is more than doublethat of the previous generation Surface Laptop 5 and significantly
exceeds the battery performance of the Intel Core Ultra system. The
MacBook Air offers about 16% less video playback time than the
new Surface Laptop..

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The new Surface Laptop
has over 21 hours ofvideo playback on asingle charge

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Battery Life
Procyon Battery Life

Battery Life Thoughts
The Procyon Productivity battery test is a performancequalified battery life test, meaning it measures performancewith each loop of its productivity test suite to look for
performance variations. We will be reporting performance inisolation later in this report.

The new Snapdragon X Elite is performing as
promised in our battery life testing, matchingor beating the 15-in MacBook Air in our results
and offering significantly more usable time on
DC power than the previous generation Surface
Laptop using the 12th Core i7 and the MSI
hardware with the Intel Core Ultra.
Battery life has always been one of the majoradvantages of the Windows on Arm platform, but
now it is doing it without sacrificing performance,
as you’ll see in our results in this research.

In this battery life test the new Surface Laptop is able to operate in a productivity environment more than
30% longer than both the previous generation Surface Laptop 5 and the system based on the new Intel
Core Ultra 7 processor. The MacBook Air powered by the M3 offers equivalent battery life.

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Anecdotally, the connected standby time on the
new new Surface Laptop is fantastic, showing adrop of just 1% of its battery in a standard 8-9hour overnight closed-lid scenario. Combining
this characteristic with extended battery life wesee during our usage testing and the result is aplatform that is built for all-day and all-weekend
battery life.

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Performance
Bounding
Peak and sustained synthetic
performance comparisons.

Geekbench 6.3
Geekbench 6 is self-described as a benchmark thatmeasures a “system’s performance with the press ofa button” and allows for device comparisons between
everything from mobile to desktop. It is comprised of acollection of workloads that stress the CPU and GPU,through tests that the developer considers “real world”
in that they represent workloads from augmented reality
to object detection to file compression and much more.
While Geekbench isn’t an exact measurement of a
specific real world application, Signal65 likes to use
Geekbench as a general purpose performance indicatorfor bursty, broad-coverage workloads.

The new Surface
Laptop is up to 2x
the multi-threaded
performance of theprevious generation
Surface Laptop

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The single threaded results of Geekbench 6 indicate that the Snapdragon X Elite used in the new Surface
Laptop is almost 20% faster than the previous generation Surface Laptop and still 10-15% faster thanthe Intel Core Ultra 7 powered machine. Surface Pro 9 5G with the Qualcomm-powered SQ3 SoC is barely
offering half the single threaded performance of the new X Elite. The MacBook Air 15-in and M3 processor
performs very well here, leading the X Elite by 10%.
In the multi-threaded results that stress all the cores in each design as much as possible in thesescenarios, the new Surface Laptop is the outright winner, outperforming the 12th Gen Core i7 in the Laptop
5 by 35% and overcomes the Apple M3 chip by around 15%.

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Performance Bounding

Snapdragon X Elite
is up to 30% fasterin sustained, all-core
performance thanthe Apple M3

Cinebench 2024
Cinebench has been a consistent benchmark used inengineering analysis and reviews across the industry for years.
It is based on the Maxon Cinema 4D rendering engine and runs
in both single threaded and multi-threaded configurations in
an attempt to measure maximum, sustained performance of aprocessor. We use the phrase “sustained performance” since
it can be run for 10-30 minute intervals and will saturate thecooling capability of a laptop or desktop machine to measureperformance that a system can maintain over a longer periodof time.

The results in Cinebench show us that the single threaded performance of the Snapdragon X Elite chipin the new Surface Laptop is roughly 20% faster than the Surface Laptop 5 and its 12th Gen Core i7 CPU,but that the M3 chip in the MacBook Air is about 15% faster. The multi-threaded results tilt the favor
towards the X Elite, where it offers more than double the performance of the previous generation Surface
Laptop and is more than 30% faster than the Apple M3. Even the larger 16-in Intel Core Ultra system withthe 155H can’t catch the new Surface Laptop. A very impressive result.

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Performance Bounding

Performance Bounding
We call this section “performance bounding” because bothof the test suites included are meant to represent the peakor sustained performance of the platform and architectures.
The collection of Geekbench sub-tests might each be
representative of some application, but the collective result
and score is really more of a “best case” or representative
situation to a power user across a range of workloads. And
while most users might not be using the Cinema 4D engine
for 3D rendering, the single and multi-threaded results help
to demonstrate the performance capabilities of the devices inquestion should you have a workload similarly demanding.

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The results in this case indicate that the new Surface Laptop
powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor is a
powerful and market shifting combination. Against both theprevious generation 12th Gen Core i7 platform and the new
Core Ultra 7 155H CPU, the X Elite is generally faster in both
single and multi-threaded testing, making the case for it being
an amazing option for both lightly threaded, burst workloads
and sustained, high impact applications.

And against the Apple M3, considered the leading silicon
option in this segment, the Snapdragon X Elite finds itself
within 10% of the performance in pure single-threaded results
but 15-30% faster in multi-threaded ones.

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Modern AI Performance
AI throughput and performance.
Procyon AI Computer Vision

Easily the biggest hurdle for AI performance analysis

From UL, “Procyon AI Computer Vision Benchmark gives
insights into how AI inference engines perform on your
Windows PC or Apple Mac. The benchmark features several
AI inference engines from different vendors, with benchmark
scores reflecting the performance of on-device inferencing
operations.”

platforms where support for different precisions andThis test includes testing of models MobileNet V3, Inception
V4, YOLO V3, DeepLab V3, Real-ESRGAN, and ResNet
50. These models achieve a range of image recognition,
classification, and upscaling functions and it supports both
integer and floating-point precisions, where supported by
the hardware and development stacks per platform.

Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and twice the speed of the neuralsignal65.com

today is finding ways to compare architectures andsoftware APIs varies widely. The Procyon AI benchmark
shows us that when we are able to compare across thecommon integer precision data on these systems, the
NPU on the Snapadragon X Elite in the new Surface
Laptop is completely unrivaled in performance. Rated at
45 TOPS, it is more than 3x faster than the NPU on theprocessor on the Apple M3 chip.

The new Surface
Laptop has 2x more
NPU performance thanApple M3

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Modern AI Performance
DaVinci Resolve AI Functions: Magic Mask, Smart Reframe

Modern AI Performance Thoughts

Blackmagic Design has been a leading developer in the content creation field and is integrating various
AI functions throughout its software. In DaVinci Resolve, the Magic Mask feature uses AI inference toidentify and track an object through a video clip using only very rough indicators from the content creator.
This speeds of development of new creative that must remove, overlay, or adjust complex, fast moving
masked content.

This section of our report covering the performance and compatibility of AI software for the
PC is one that we expect to grow and change quite a bit over the next 12 months. Tools likethe Procyon AI benchmarks help us understand the capabilities of the NPUs and AI computefor each platform, but the real-world implications of this AI PC revolution are just getting
started. Microsoft has been clear for its vision that AI will drastically change the way we use
our computers, the way we interact with software, and how we get things done.
The DaVinci Resolve preview is another example of how applications will evolve andimprove workflows to make us faster, more creative, and more productive.
As it stands today, the Snapdragon X Elite platform used in the new Surface Laptop is thehighest performance NPU available in a consumer processor and our benchmarks show thepotential it provides. Other computing options like Intel Lunar Lake and AMD Strix Point will
have an impact later in the year, but the end result will be more AI performance and more AI
experiences for PC users.

Though this is an early preview build of a new version of Resolve that supports the Qualcomm Snapdragon X
Elite processor, we were able to utilize Magic Mask effectively, and at impressive speed, thanks to the Hexagon
NPU. You can see in the screenshot above that the masking feature is utilizing the NPU, as will other integrated AI
features like Smart Reframe. Signal65 will have more testing on this update to Resolve soon.

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A MOD E RN AI PC D E S I GNMedia Processing
Measuring transcoding performance.

Up to 25% fasterencoding than theApple M3

Handbrake 1.7.3
Handbrake has been a staple of media testing for a decade or more as it is both apowerful tool that is based on the industry standard ffmpeg application but also in its
ability to support leading edge architectures and features.
Intel has some of the best media processing and acceleration capabilities across theentire industry in its CPUs as part of the Quick Sync integration, and our Handbrake
results indicate that is still the case. The new Surface Laptop with the Snapdragon X
Elite performs great in our transcoding operations, beating out the MacBook Air and theM3 by 15-25% depending on the conversion and moving slightly ahead of the previous
generation Surface Laptop 5. The Core Ultra 7 155H and its media engine though are asolid 40% ahead of the next best option.

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Modern Web Performance
Everyday performance in modern web applications and browsers.
Google Chrome
Using the latest version of the Chrome browser, now
available natively for Windows on Arm, we are running eachplatform through standard browser performance tests like
Speedometer v3 and JetStream v2.2. These tests look at a
range of capabilities from JavaScript to Web Assembly andworkloads like rendering charts and editing rich text.

While the efficiency and speed of Chromerunning on Mac doesn’t appear to be inquestion based on these scores, from a
Windows perspective, the new Surface
Laptop with the Snapdragon X Elite SoC
leads that pack. Thanks to that recent releaseof the native version of Chrome for the
Arm64 architecture, the most popular web
browser now is a first-class citizen in the app
ecosystem, and the performance results speak
for themselves.
There is no more sacrifice in performanceor efficiency if you depend on the Chromebrowser as your primary interface to the web.

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Performance of Office 365 across this set of tests isfairly uniform on systems ranging from the new Intel
Core Ultra to the 12th Gen Core i7 based Surface Laptop

Productivity

5 and of course the new Surface Laptop powered by the
Snapdragon X Elite. Only the SQ3 stands out, but offers
a supporting data point to the narrative that moving toa system powered by the X Elite isn’t sacrificing yourability to be productive.

Office and advanced productivity
performance testing.

The Procyon Productivity test uses Microsoft Office 365
applications to evaluate performance using real-world
workloads and scenarios. There are two versions of this test,
one that is multi-platform that can be run on Windows and Mac
devices, and one that is Windows only (due to a difference ofMicrosoft Outlook integration). Scores for both versions aredifferent and reported separately.

This second version of the test only compares the
Windows laptops but adds performance analysis in
the Outlook email and calendar application. The new
Surface Laptop and the Snapdragon X Elite havethe best performance of any of the systems in thiscomparison and this time is 10% faster than the previous
generation Surface device thanks to the impact of the
Outlook subtest.

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Productivity

Productivity Thoughts
Productivity performance is an area that many would
consider to be a “solved problem” in the world of computing.
Applications like Word and PowerPoint aren’t typicallythought of as performance drains on your machine, though
Excel can be bottlenecked by single threaded throughput if
you have a lot of complex macros or formulas.

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But in previous generations of Windows on Arm systems
there have been concerns about baseline performanceand the need to emulate some of these applications on
slower CPUs. That is no longer the case. Office 365 runs
natively on Arm-based processors now and the results on
the Snapdragon X Elite demonstrate that not only is it “fine”
performance but that it is exceeding the previous generation
Surface Laptop and putting in a great battle against Intel’slatest offerings.

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Graphics
Performance
GPU performance analysis in synthetic
and real-world testing.

3DMarkUL Benchmark’s 3DMark family of tests is one of
the longest tenured set of benchmarks in the world
and the developers have continued to innovate andbuild leading-edge tests to evaluate performance
appropriately across a range of hardware, APIs, andgraphics features.

Because of the different supported features and

The Solar Bay benchmark is a ray tracing specificFinally, a brand new tests that was released today,

platforms on all three of these 3DMark tests,

test and any graphics system that doesn’t support

the Steel Nomad benchmark is meant specificallyunderstanding the results can be a bit confusing.

hardware ray tracing will not generate a score.

to look at integrated graphics performance on

In the Wild Life Extreme test, which is the oldest ofIntegrated graphics solutions on the previous

Windows and Windows on Arm platforms, but

the three shown here but still supports modern APIs

generation of Surface devices don’t support RT.

won’t run on MacOS. The results look a bit different

like DX12 and Metal, the Snapdragon X Elite on the

The Snapdragon X Elite does have hardware raythan what Wild Life Extreme shows us: a 2x

new Surface Laptop is roughly 2x the performance

tracing, though it is 20-30% behind both the Arc

improvement for the new Surface Laptop over theof the 12th Gen Core i7 and SQ3 Surface devices,graphics on the Intel Meteor Lake architecture andprevious Surface Laptop 5, but the Arc graphics

and is 5% ahead of the latest Intel Core Ultra

the Apple M3.

on the Intel Core Ultra 155H shows well with a solid

processor with integrated Arc graphics. The GPU

35% advantage.

on the Apple M3 is showing some muscle here,
resulting in a 30% performance lead.

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Graphics Performance

Graphics & Gaming
This section of our analysis of the new Surface Laptop might
be the most complex and one that pushes us to revisit our
testing in a few months. It’s clear from the synthetic 3DMark
test results that the Adreno GPU that Qualcomm has built
into the Snapdragon X Elite is powerful enough to standwithin range of the integrated graphics leaders in the market
today including the Intel Arc graphics on Meteor Lake and theApple M3. And it offers modern features like ray tracing andimage upscaling.

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What you don’t see here yet is performance measurements ingames. We spent many hours looking at different titles that
do work on the new Surface Laptop, and to be clear there aremany (and plenty that Qualcomm has been demoing during
its press tours over the last 6 months). We were able to play
Cyberpunk 2077, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Borderlands 3,
and others at a 1080p resolution and image quality settings
generally on low.

Some of the biggest game titles that require kernel-level anticheat platforms won’t run today, like Fortnite, and that’s asignificant miss for a mainstream gaming option.
PC gaming is a complicated and long-term investment thatboth Microsoft and Qualcomm will have to make, improving
the software and driver stack for gamers to grow confidencein Adreno as even a mainstream gaming option.

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Emulation
Performance
Performance of emulated applications underWindows on Arm.

Though we continue to see that the ecosystem of Windows
applications improves in its support of native Armarchitectures, there are still some tools and apps that do nothave native Arm versions and thus need to run in an emulated
state. Microsoft is very proud of its new emulation layer that ispart of Windows 11, but one area of interest from our team interms of performance is if the Snapdragon X Elite platform canprovide a good enough experience in those particular cases.

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Blender + Adobe Lightroom
Classic
For this testing we looked at two different
applications: Adobe Lightroom Classic andBlender.
To measure the performance of Lightroom
Classic we used the PugetBench tool, andthe results are impressive. Not only is the
new Surface Laptop with the X Elite CPU
30% faster than the previous generation
Surface Laptop 5 with the 12th Gen Core i7(that is obviously running the app natively),
but it matches performance of the newIntel Core Ultra.
Blender 4.1 is a much more intense
workload with a single long-form render.
The new Surface Laptop is 35% fasterthan the previous generation Surface
but due to the sustained nature of thisworkload is ~40% behind the Core Ultrasystem under test. The MacBook Air does
outperform the Snapdragon X Elite hereby 17%, though it is also running in a native

application mode, just as the Intel-based
platforms are.
It is worth noting that the standard
version of Adobe Lightroom (not theClassic version that many users stilluse) does run natively on Windows on
Arm. Also, there is an alpha build ofBlender 4.2 that supports Windows on
Arm too, but it was early enough in thatdevelopment process that we didn’t
want to integrate it into our test plan yet.
The key point of this testing was to findrelevant and popular titles that run in an
emulated state today to evaluate Prism
and the improved X Elite performance.

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Emulation Performance

Emulation Thoughts
Both test results indicate that the emulation performancefor Windows on Arm and the capability of the Snapdragon
X Elite platform provide enough performance to ensure thatany programs that haven’t yet been converted over to an
Arm-native version will still run exceedingly well on the new
Surface Laptop. Emulated performance on the new device isoutperforming even the native performance of the 12th Gen
Core i7 previous generation Surface Laptop 5 – an impressivefeat that should settle the nerves of any consumer debating
the purchase of a new PC using this processor.

Microsoft was very proud of the telemetry it shared withpress and analysts about the progress on both its emulator
performance and the transition of the application ecosystem
to native Windows on Arm. Microsoft claims that 87% of“application minutes” will run natively on the new Snapdragon
X Elite platforms. That is significant progress from just a
couple of years ago where finding tools and apps that justwouldn’t run on Windows on Arm was common.

That remaining 13% isn’t without some important tools thatneed to be addressed. As of this writing we still do not havea native version of Adobe Premier, the leading tool for video
editing and content creators. There are others that are in thesame state that will apply to some subset of readers, but thecurrent outlook for the future of Windows on Arm is a nightand-day difference from where we stood just a few years ago.

Emulated performance on the
new Surface is outperforming
even the native performanceof the 12th Gen Core i7
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A MOD E RN AI PC D E S I GN

SignalThroughthe Noise
What a flagship, premium Windows
device can be & the most impressive
new laptop to hit the PC market in along time

While we are still in the earliest stagesof determining what an AI PC will be, ourtesting and analysis of the new Surface
Laptop shows us what a flagship, premium
Windows device can do. It combines aleading performance CPU with a neuralprocessing unit (NPU) that has theopportunity to change the direction of
personal computing.
Microsoft and its Copilot+ PC category
promises consumers and businesses a
drastic improvement and shift in how we
get work done and how our computers will
help us create. Much of that vision isn’t
discussed in this paper and is something
we’ll be analyzing and testing over the restof 2024. But make no mistake, the Surface
product group is betting on the NPU andgeneral performance capability of the
Snapdragon X Elite processor to bring thatvision to life.
The 45 TOPS NPU on the X Elite is by far
the fastest in consumer products today,
but newer NPU integrations are due later inthe year from Intel and AMD that will matchthese results, creating another opportunity
to accelerate AI PC adoption.
Even isolated from the Copilot+ PC
discussion, the new Surface Laptop offers
great performance for a modern PC.
Compared to other Windows machines

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on the market powered by traditional x86
processors, the Snapdragon X Elite offers
better single threaded and multi-threaded
performance generally, besting the previous
generation Surface Laptop 5 by more than
50% in heavily threaded workloads. This
platform even goes toe to toe with the Intel
Core Ultra system we compared it to.
Application compatibility is an area that
Microsoft has made significant strides
in, with thousands of the most popular
apps now running natively on the Armarchitecture. And for programs that stillneed to run under emulation, the new Prism
engine improves performance over previous
emulators to meet or exceed the native
performance of the last gen Surface Laptop
5. Seeing the Snapdragon X Elite as thefastest CPU for the Google Chrome browser
is quite the turnaround from just a couple
years ago!
Our measured battery life on the new
Surface Laptop is impressive too, with over
21 hours of video playback and providing
more than 2x the usable battery life
compared to the previous Surface Laptop.
It also lasts longer than the Apple MacBook
Air using the M3 chip by more than 15%.
Our time spent with the new Surface
Laptop when it came to usable battery life
in real-world workloads, standby time, andsnappiness coming back from sleep made it

the best PC experience we’ve had.
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 apivotal 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 tocompete with yet, and does it all for $200
less than an equivalent MacBook Air.
Microsoft and the Surface group havecreated 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 forthis 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 themodern consumer.

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A MOD E RN AI PC D E S I GN

Important
Information
About thisReportContact Information
Signal65 | signal65.com | info@signal65.com

Contributors

Disclosures

Ryan Shrout
President & GM - Signal65
Ken Addison
Client Performance Director - Signal65

Signal65 provides research, analysis,
advising, and lab services to many high-techcompanies, including those mentioned inthis paper. Research of this document wascommissioned by Microsoft.

Inquiries
Contact us if you would like to discuss thisreport and Signal65 will respond promptly.

CitationsThis paper can be cited by accredited press
and analysts, but must be cited in-context,
displaying author’s name, author’s title, and“Signal65.” Non-press and non-analysts
must receive prior written permission by
Signal65 for any citations.

LicensingThis document, including any supporting
materials, is owned by Signal65. Thispublication may not be reproduced,
distributed, or shared in any form without
the prior written permission of Signal65.

About Signal65
Signal65 exists to be a source of data ina world where technology markets andproduct landscapes create complex anddistorted views of product truth. We strive
to provide honest and comprehensive
feedback and analysis for our clients inorder for them to better understand theirown competitive positioning and create
optimal opportunities to market andmessage their devices and services.

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A MOD E RN AI PC D E S I GN

System Configurations
MICROSOFT SURFACE LAPTOPMICROSOFT SURFACE LAPTOP 5

MICROSOFT SURFACE PRO 9 5G

MSI PRESTIGE 16 AI EVO
A1MG

APPLE MACBOOK AIR 15

CPU

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100

Intel Core i7-1255U

Microsoft SQ3Intel Core Ultra 7 155H

Apple M3

RAM

16GB LPDDRX-8448

16GB DDR5-5200

16GB LPDDR4X-2092

32GB LPDDR5X-6400

16GB LPDDR5X-6400

Storage

512GB Samsung MZ9L4512HBLU-00BMV

512GB Samsung MZ9L4512HBLU-00BMV

512GB KIOXIA KBG40ZNS512G

1TB Western Digital SN560

512GB SSD

GPU

Qualcomm Adreno GPUIntel Iris Xe Graphics

Qualcomm Adreno GPUIntel Arc Graphics

Integrated

NPU

Qualcomm Hexagon NPU

N/A

Qualcomm Hexagon NPUIntel AI Boost

Apple Neural Engine

Display

15” 2496x1644

15” 2496x1644

13” 2880x1920

16” 3840x2400

15” 2880x1864

OS

Windows 11 Pro 26097.5003

Windows 11 Home 26100.1

Windows 11 Home 26080.1400

Windows 11 Home 26100.1

MacOS Sonoma 14.4

Windows Power Mode (Performance)

Best Performance

Best Performance

Best Performance

Best Performance

N/A

Windows Power Mode (Battery Tests)

Recommended

Recommended

Recommended

Best Power Efficiency

N/A

OEM Power Settings (Performance)

N/A

N/A

N/A

Extreme Performance

N/A

OEM Power Settings (Battery Tests)

N/A

N/A

N/A

Super Battery

N/A

Firmware Version

110.1.235

11.104.13

18.7.235

E15A1IMS.10A

N/A

Virtualization Based Security

EnabledEnabledEnabledEnabled

N/A

Applications Used
Geekbench 6.3.0

UL Procyon 2.7.1108

Blender 4.1.1

Cinebench 2024.0.1

Handbrake 1.7.3

Davinci Resolve 18.6.4 Dev Build (Snapdragon Surface Laptop)

Google Chrome version 124

Microsoft Office 365 0403

3DMark 2.28.8228

Adobe Lightroom Classic 13.2

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