All the benchmarks that beat Microsoft’s MacBook Air

Microsoft is on a mission to take down the MacBook Air with its new Copilot Plus line of PCs. It’s so confident it’s finally got Windows on Arm right that it spent an entire day comparing its new Surface Laptop to the MacBook Air at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, last month. On the edge Several real-world benchmarks and simulated tests were shown to demonstrate a new Qualcomm-powered Surface Laptop outperforming Apple’s best-selling laptop.

While I previously covered Microsoft’s confidence in beating Apple’s M3 processor, I thought it would be useful to take a closer look at all the benchmark claims and battery life estimates. Microsoft addressed some of these during its Surface and Windows AI event last week, but the claims on stage weren’t always as detailed as what Microsoft employees showed me last month.

I wasn’t able to run the benchmarks myself, but the results should serve as important data as we get closer to the launch of these Copilot Plus PCs on June 18. It’s also worth noting that, unlike Apple’s MacBook Air, Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop is fanless, allowing it to squeeze out more performance. Microsoft compared its Surface Laptop only to the MacBook Air M3 – not to a fan-equipped MacBook Pro.

Either way, benchmarks aren’t everything, and we’ll get a better idea of ​​true real-world performance and battery life when we review the Surface Laptop next month.

Microsoft started the day of benchmarks by first measuring raw performance between the Surface Laptop and the MacBook Air M3. It showed two benchmark claims, showing sustained performance using the Cinebench 2024 multithreaded workload and peak performance using the Geekbench 6 multithreaded test.

The Surface Laptop achieved a score of 980 in Cinebench 2024 multithreaded and a score of 14,000 in Geekbench 6 multithreaded. Microsoft avoided highlighting the single-threaded scores of both benchmarks, likely because the MacBook Air would score slightly better here.

Either way, Microsoft claims its new Surface Laptop will outperform the MacBook Air M3 in Cinebench multithreaded workloads by 50 percent. In Geekbench 6, the Surface Laptop is just 16% better. On stage last week, Microsoft also claimed that its Copilot Plus line of PCs will be “58% faster than a MacBook Air M3.”

Next, Microsoft addressed what it describes as “real-world performance.” The main test here was a HandBrake ToS benchmark, which measures how long it takes to encode a 4K video file. The Snapdragon X Elite-powered Surface Laptop achieved this in five minutes and eight seconds, faster than the six minutes and 26 seconds the MacBook Air M3 took.

Most importantly, it was twice as fast as the Surface Laptop 5 running a 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake CPU, which took 10 minutes and 30 seconds to complete the task. A Surface Laptop 4 took even longer, 13 minutes and 32 seconds.

Microsoft’s comparisons to the MacBook Air M3 also extend to battery life. During testing, I saw Microsoft simulate battery life for web browsing and video playback. Microsoft uses a script to simulate web browsing. On the 2022 Intel-based Surface Laptop 5, it took eight hours and 38 minutes to completely drain the battery; the new Surface Laptop lasted twice as long, clocking in at 16 hours and 56 minutes. This beats the same test on a 15-inch MacBook Air M3, which lasted 15 hours and 25 minutes.

Microsoft ran a similar test for video playback, which saw the Surface Laptop last over 20 hours, with the MacBook Air M3 achieving 17 hours and 45 minutes. That’s also almost eight hours longer than the Surface Laptop 5, which lasted 12 hours and 30 minutes.

Microsoft claimed on stage last week that new Copilot Plus PCs powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor will offer “20% more battery life than the latest 15-inch MacBook Air.”

The final benchmarks Microsoft showed me were related to NPU performance. Microsoft claims that the NPU inside the Snapdragon X Elite is nearly twice as fast on AI acceleration tasks as Apple’s M3 Neural Engine in the Procyon AI Computer Vision cross-platform benchmark.

The Surface Laptop scored 1,745 points in the Procyon AI Score, while the MacBook Air managed 889. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite has 45 TOPS of AI acceleration performance, much more than the 18 TOPS found in the M3.

Microsoft also showed off the Surface Laptop achieving 4.5x inference efficiency for Phi Silica model prompt processing on the M3, along with 24 TOPS/watt of peak inference efficiency.