Microsoft's new Copilot+ PC smoked Apple's MacBook M3 in performance and battery life

Microsoft recently unveiled a suite of new PCs integrated with its new artificial intelligence, Copilot+. The first batch of new PCs are coming in the form of AI laptops, and the ones available are powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite SoC. It's expected Intel and AMD will release their own versions later this year.

8

The X Elite was recently put up against Apple's MacBook Air M3 by benchmarking and analysis company Signal64. Ryan Shrout, a former Intel employee and President & GM of Signal65 headed the report, which was commissioned by Microsoft. A common move by companies that want to legitimize the claims they are making about their products.

The report found the X Elite outperformed Apple's M3 silicon in a variety of different tests, with the X Elite-powered Surface Laptop surviving over 21 hours in a local video playback test, which is 15% longer than a MacBook Air M3 and twice as long as the Surface Pro 9. Notably, the X Elite did lose to the M3 silicon in single-core performance in both Cinebench and Geekbench by approximately 15%. However, in multi-core performance, the X Elite was found to be more than 30% faster than Apple's M3.

8

Further multi-core testing found the X Elite to be twice as fast as 12th-gen Intel Core i7 chip and approximately 5% faster than Intel's latest Core Ultra 7 155H. Moving onto Handbrake encoding testing, where the X Elite beat the M3 by nearly 25%.

8

However, it isn't all sunshine and rainbows for the X Elite, as Shrout tested Microsoft's new Prism emulation layer against laptops running apps natively. Shrout found the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H was around 46% faster, while the Apple M3 was 17% faster than the X Elite.

8

These results highlight the importance of emulated performance versus native performance in applications, and performance appears to vary from app to app. The X Elite was able to match the performance of the Core Ultra 7 155H in Lightroom Classic when the Intel chip was running the application natively.

8

Overall, this indicates Microsoft has some work to do with its Prism emulation tool, which will come in the form of future updates down the road.

8

As for other Copilot+ news, Microsoft has landed itself in some hot water with its Windows Recall feature, as it enables users to travel back to a specific time on their PC - picture web browsing history but at a Windows level - but at the cost of Recall taking a screenshot of the users desktop.