In the run up to the June 18 debut of Microsoft's Surface Laptop 7 the company has spent a considerable amount of effort comparing its new Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite X-powered computers to the Apple MacBook Air M3.
That includes pitting the pair against each other in a series of performance benchmarks at Microsoft HQ in Washington last month during Microsoft's Build 2024 developer conference. The Verge has compiled those results and shown that despite some skirting by Microsoft, the Surface Laptop 7 beats the Air M3 in Cinebench and Geekbench 6 multi-threaded CPU performance benchmarks.
The Surface Laptop's Cinebench score came in at 980 compared to 650 for the Air, while the Geekbench score was 14,000 compared to 12,000 for the MacBook. Not bad, but not significantly better either.
On battery life, the web browsing tests Microsoft showed had the Surface Laptop lasting for 16 hours and 56 minutes, compared to 15 hours 25 minutes for the Air. Video playback lasted even longer, 20 hours for the Surface and 17 hours 45 minutes for the Air.
For those who are interested in AI performance, Microsoft claims that the Snapdragon X Elite NPU is 2x faster than the AI acceleration tasks in M3. However, it should be noted that the M3 is being scrapped specifically so Apple can focus on AI with the M4 chip.
Again, all of these are score claims made by Microsoft.
Two things raise flags in Microsoft’s crusade against the Air M3. The Surface features fans which can help with performance, while the Air M3 does not. Also, Microsoft did not compare the Surface Laptop against the MacBook Pro M3, which does have fans.
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