All of Microsoft's MacBook Air-beating benchmarks

Microsoft Challenges MacBook Air with New Surface Laptop

Performance Benchmarks
Microsoft's new Surface Laptop, powered by Qualcomm, showcased superior performance in benchmarks compared to the MacBook Air M3, achieving higher scores in Cinebench and Geekbench.

Battery Life Improvements
The Surface Laptop demonstrated significant advancements in battery life, outlasting the MacBook Air in web browsing and video playback scenarios.

NPU Performance
The Snapdragon X Elite's NPU in the Surface Laptop nearly doubled the AI acceleration performance compared to Apple's M3 Neural Engine, according to Procyon AI benchmarks.

Real-World Testing
Microsoft also highlighted real-world performance with faster video encoding times in HandBrake benchmarks, suggesting practical benefits beyond controlled tests.

Microsoft utilized several benchmarks to demonstrate the performance of their new Surface Laptop compared to the MacBook Air M3. These benchmarks included:

1. Cinebench 2024 Multithreaded Workload: This test measures the sustained performance capabilities of a processor under a multithreaded scenario2. The Surface Laptop scored 980, significantly higher than the MacBook Air M3's score of 650.

2. Geekbench 6 Multithreaded Test: This benchmark assesses the peak performance of the processor in multitasking and high-load situations. Here, the Surface Laptop achieved a score of 14,000, compared to the MacBook Air M3's 12,000.

3. HandBrake ToS 4K: This real-world benchmark tests how long it takes to encode a 4K video file2. The Surface Laptop completed this task in 5 minutes and 8 seconds, faster than the MacBook Air M3, which took 6 minutes and 26 seconds2.

4. Procyon AI Computer Vision Benchmark: This test evaluates the performance of the neural processing unit (NPU). The Surface Laptop scored 1,745, nearly double the MacBook Air M3's score of 889.

These benchmarks were chosen to showcase the Surface Laptop's capabilities in both raw computational power and specialized tasks like AI processing, highlighting its superiority over the MacBook Air M3 in these aspects2.