The Microsoft Surface 7 laptop was announced by the company earlier this week alongside the Surface Pro 11, and it appears that the company’s first benchmark Surface laptop with the Snapdragon X Elite chip will beat Apple’s MacBook Air in several benchmarks. Tests outperform Intel Meteor Lake CPU and SQ3 chip. The benchmark results also suggest that Qualcomm’s latest Copilot+ processors for PCs could be paired with Apple’s silicon chips in the coming weeks.
Surface Laptop 7 reviews are still pending, but Microsoft’s testing of Snapdragon X Elite-equipped laptops has shown reliable battery life, excellent thermal management, and strong CPU performance. However, it appears to lag behind Apple’s third-generation silicon processors in terms of graphics, gaming and web performance.
In a report, Signal65 compared the Surface Laptop 7 with the Surface Laptop 9 with the Arm-based Microsoft SQ3 processor, the Surface Laptop 5 with the 12th Gen Intel Core 7 processor, and the MSI Prestige 16 AI with the current Intel -Generation. Comparison with the Evo. Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Air with Core Ultra 7 CPU and M3 chip. All laptops came with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of internal storage, except for the MSI laptop, which had 32GB of RAM and 1TB of internal storage.
In two popular benchmark tests, Geekbench 6.3 and Cinebench 2024, the new Surface Laptop 7 significantly outperformed all other laptops except the M3 MacBook Air 15-inch in the single-core test. Multi-core testing is underway. However, the new Surface Laptop performed best among all laptops tested. Additionally, the tests showed that this chip is up to 30% faster in multi-core performance than the M3 chip.
Meanwhile, the Surface Laptop 7’s Snapdragon X Elite chip significantly outperformed other laptops in the Procyon AI Computer Vision benchmark test. Qualcomm’s Arm-based chip in this laptop offers more than twice the NPU performance of the 15-inch MacBook Air M3.
Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop 7 beats the Surface Laptop 5, Surface Pro 9 and MacBook Air M3 with Handbrake 1.7.3, but falls well short of the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo with the latest Core Ultra 7 155H processor. In terms of web performance (Google Chrome Speedometer v3 and JetStream v2.2), however, the Surface Laptop 7 takes second place behind the MacBook Air with M3 chip.
In the graphics department, the 15-inch MacBook Air’s M3 chip beat the Surface Laptop 7’s Snapdragon X Elite in two of the three 3DMark graphics benchmark tests. However, Apple’s silicon chips were not tested in the third benchmark.
In Signal65’s local video playback tests, the Surface Laptop 7 has the best battery life, lasting more than 21 hours on a single charge, which is more than the MacBook Air, which has a 16 percent shorter battery life. Procyon’s battery tests found that MacBook Air and Surface Laptop 7 with M3 chips have “comparable” battery life.
It’s worth noting that while these tests were conducted by Microsoft, the benchmarks were run by an independent third-party company. Reviews of the new Surface Laptop 7 are still pending and we expect to know more about its everyday performance, battery life and other parameters after the laptop launches in the US next month.
Bhupendra Singh Chundawat is a seasoned technology journalist with over 22 years of experience in the media industry. He specializes in covering the global technology landscape, with a deep focus on manufacturing trends and the geopolitical impact on tech companies. Currently serving as the Editor at Udaipur Kiran, his insights are shaped by decades of hands-on reporting and editorial leadership in the fast-evolving world of technology.