All of Microsoft’s MacBook Air benchmarks

Microsoft is on a mission to destroy the MacBook Air with its new Copilot Plus line of computers. She’s so confident she’s got Windows on Arm right that she spent an entire day battling her new Surface Laptop and MacBook Air at her headquarters in Redmond, Washington, last month. The Verge several real-world benchmarks and simulated tests were shown to demonstrate the new Qualcomm-powered Surface Laptop beating Apple’s best-selling laptop.

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

I wasn’t able to run the benchmarks myself, but the results should serve as an important data point as these Copilot Plus computers get closer to launch on June 18th. It’s also important to note that unlike Apple’s MacBook Air, Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop is fanless, allowing it to squeeze out more power. Microsoft only compared its Surface Laptop to the MacBook Air M3 — not the fan-equipped MacBook Pro.

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

Microsoft kicked off the benchmark day by first measuring the raw performance between the Surface Laptop and the MacBook Air M3. It showed two benchmark claims, characterized by sustained performance using the Cinebench 2024 multi-threaded load and peak performance using the Geekbench 6 multi-threaded 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, presumably because the MacBook Air would score slightly better here.

Either way, Microsoft claims its new Surface Laptop outperforms the MacBook Air M3 in Cinebench’s multi-threaded load by 50 percent. In Geekbench 6, the Surface Laptop is only 16 percent better. Microsoft also announced on stage last week that its Copilot Plus line of computers will be “58 percent faster than the MacBook Air M3.”

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

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

Microsoft’s comparison with the MacBook Air M3 also covers battery life. During tests, I saw Microsoft simulate battery life while browsing the web and playing video. Microsoft uses a script to simulate web browsing. The 2022 Intel-powered Surface Laptop 5 took eight hours and 38 minutes to completely drain the battery; the new Surface Laptop lasted twice as long, 16 hours and 56 minutes. That beats the same test on the 15-inch MacBook Air M3, which lasted 15 hours and 25 minutes.

Microsoft ran a similar video playback test in which the Surface Laptop lasted more than 20 hours, while the MacBook Air M3 achieved 17 hours and 45 minutes. That’s also nearly eight hours more than the Surface Laptop 5, which lasted 12 hours and 30 minutes.

Microsoft claimed on stage last week that the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite-powered Copilot Plus computers will offer “20 percent longer battery life than the latest 15-inch MacBook Air.”

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

The Surface Laptop scored 1,745 on the Procyon AI score, while the MacBook Air scored 889. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite has a TOP 45 AI acceleration performance, much higher than the M3’s TOP 18.

Microsoft also showcased the Surface Laptop, which achieved 4.5 times the inference efficiency for fast Phi Silica processing over the M3, along with 24 TOPS/watt of peak inference efficiency.