Microsoft’s advertising for its upcoming Windows laptops powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor will claim they are faster than the MacBook Air with Apple’s latest M3 chip, according to internal Microsoft documents discovered by The Verge.
After years of failed promises from Qualcomm, Microsoft believes the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will finally offer the performance it has been looking for to push Windows on Arm much more aggressively. Microsoft is now betting big on Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors, which will ship in a variety of Windows laptops this year and Microsoft’s latest consumer-focused Surface hardware.
“Microsoft is so confident in these new Qualcomm chips that it’s planning several demos that will show how these processors will be faster than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tasks, AI acceleration, and even app emulation,” the report says. Microsoft will also claim that its laptops will offer “faster app emulation” than Apple’s Rosetta 2.
Qualcomm debuted the Snapdragon X Elite last October. The processor is ARM-based like Apple Silicon. The company claimed at the time that the new chip performed 21% faster than the M3 chip when it comes to multi-core CPU performance, based on the Geekbench 6 benchmark tool.
At this point, we don’t know for sure which M3 chip Microsoft and Qualcomm are comparing the new chip to. In addition to the base M3 chip, Apple also offers higher-end M3 Pro and M3 Max chips. It is also likely that the Snapdragon X Elite will likely run hotter and require laptops to be equipped with fans. Since being updated with the M1 chip in 2020, the MacBook Air has featured a fanless design.
Microsoft plans to announce laptops powered by the Snapdragon X Elite later this year, including the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 on May 20.