Microsoft plans to launch a product to compete with the MacBook’s in-house processor, a new version of the ARM-based Surface Pro X with Windows 11 pre-installed. Engineering samples of the upcoming Surface models on GeekBench show that the next-generation Qualcomm Snapdragon is a big step up in multi-core performance, but the results are still nowhere near the Apple M1.
Qualcomm has been focusing not on performance but on battery life, and the processor maker is now gradually moving to a new design that will optimize performance even more with the combination of “Gold+” and “Gold+ high-end cores”. Qualcomm’s plan is to bridge the gap between Intel, Snapdragon and Apple Silicon.
The benchmark listing was made public this year, and the listing shows an “OEMVL OEMVL” prototype. The name of the scheme has been used by Microsoft for the Surface Pro series, Surface Laptop, Surface Book and even Surface Go before. It can be speculated that the leaked prototype is either the Surface Pro X 2 (2022) or a brand new product.
According to the listing, Microsoft is testing the hardware with Windows 11 preview builds, which appear to be in the early stages of development given its single-core test results and naming scheme. Given that the prototype was benchmarked in the early stages of development, there’s a good chance this hardware won’t make it to the market, but the Surface Pro X with the SQ3 has a good chance of arriving this year.
Reports show that the prototype scored 1,005 points on single-core and 5,574 on multi-core. The Surface Pro X with SQ2 successfully scored 806 points in the single-core test and 3247 points in the multi-core test. Comparing the two, the original model was significantly higher.
It’s worth mentioning that this unit was benchmarked on a “balanced” power plan, so results may be higher on a high-performance plan. We compared the benchmark results with the Intel Core i7 1165G7, and Microsoft’s latest product clearly outperformed the Intel processor in the multi-core test. That’s not surprising, as the intel Tiger Lake-U lineup is particularly underwhelming compared to rivals like AMD and even Apple.
Of course, Microsoft’s and Qualcomm’s processors are also clearly not comparable to the Apple M1, but we can clearly feel their improvements. The Apple M1 achieved a whopping 7000 points in the multi-core test. The benchmarked hardware is just a prototype, and no specific details have been revealed about Microsoft’s next-generation rival, the M1 processor.
