According to internal documents obtained by The Verge, Microsoft is set to promote its upcoming Windows laptops featuring the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor as faster than the MacBook Air equipped with Apple's latest M3 chip.
The report suggests that Microsoft is quite confident in these new Qualcomm chips, planning some demonstrations to showcase their superiority over the M3 MacBook Air in CPU tasks, AI acceleration, and even application emulation. Microsoft believes their laptops will offer faster application emulation than Apple's Rosetta 2.
The Snapdragon X Elite, launched last October, is developed on the Arm architecture, similar to Apple's chips. Qualcomm claimed last year that its multi-core CPU performance with the Geekbench 6 benchmark tool is 21% faster than the M3 chip.
However, the report notes that Microsoft and Qualcomm are comparing with Apple's standard M3 chip, not its high-end M3 Pro and M3 Max chips. MacBook with Apple chips also offers industry-leading performance per watt, while the Snapdragon X Elite might have higher power consumption and require a fan for cooling. In contrast, since updating to the M1 chip in 2020, MacBook Air has been fanless. Apple also has the advantage of being able to optimize MacBook performance as it has control over both the hardware and macOS software.
Nevertheless, it's clear that Apple's competitors are making strides in Arm-based laptops. Microsoft plans to release laptops with the Snapdragon X Elite later this year, including the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 on May 20th.
