Microsoft is apparently planning to launch a new version of its
ARM-based Surface Pro X with Windows 11, to compete against
MacBook’s chip. An engineering sample of the upcoming Surface
model on GeekBench shows some impressive progress in multi-core
performance, but
results are still not close to Apple M1.
Qualcomm has always focused on battery life over performance
and the chipmaker is now slowly switching to a new design which
will be more optimized for performance with “Gold+” and “Gold
high-end cores. Qualcomm’s plan is to bridge the gap between
Intel, Snapdragon and Apple’s Silicon products.
The benchmark listing was made public earlier this year,
showing an “OEMVL OEMVL” prototype. This naming scheme has
previously been used by Microsoft for the Surface Pro lineup,
Surface Laptop, Surface Book and even Surface Go. It is safe to
assume the leaked prototype is either Surface Pro X 2 (2022?)
or a new product.
As per the listing, Microsoft is
testing the hardware with Windows 11 preview builds and it
appears to be in the early stage of development given its
single-core test results and naming scheme.
Considering that the prototype was benchmarked in its early
stage of development, it’s entirely possible that this hardware
may not ship at all, but Surface Pro X with SQ3 is still on
track to launch later this year.
The report shows that the prototype was able to fetch a score
of 1005 on single-core and 5574 on multi-core. The result is
significantly higher when you compare it with Surface Pro X
with SQ2 which managed to achieve a score of 806 in the
single-core test and 3247 for multi-core.
It’s also worth pointing out that the device was benchmarked in
the ‘Balanced’ power plan, so it’s likely that the results will
be higher if the device is benchmarked again in the
high-performance plan.
We compared the benchmark results with Intel Core i7 1165G7 and
the latest offering from Microsoft apparently outperforms the
Intel chip in multi-score tests. This is not surprising as the
Intel Tiger Lake-U lineup has been particularly lackluster when
compared to rivals likes AMD and even Apple.
At the same time, Microsoft and Qualcomm’s processor is still
no match for the Apple M1, but we can clearly see noticeable
improvements. The Apple M1 fetches up to 8,000 scores in
multi-core tests.
The benchmarked hardware is a prototype and no other details
have been revealed about Microsoft’s next-gen rival to the M1
chip.
