Believe me, we were all as confused as you. Microsoft ushered in the next generation Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6, only for the Redmond team to make them enterprise-only.
But it turns out that this was all intentional. We’ve been following Qualcomm’s breadcrumbs for a while now, and as predicted, these leaks all but confirm that we’ll be getting a Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 with Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite respectively.
What does this mean for performance and energy efficiency? And more importantly, will Microsoft finally get to a point where it can go toe-to-toe with Apple silicon? Let’s dig deeper.
Scratching below the surface
So, you can see the names here. Why are we sure these are Surface Pro 10 and Laptop 6? It all comes down to the names on the listing, as they’re consistent with how Microsoft codenames its hardware: “OEMBR OEMBR” stands for Surface Laptop and “OEMMN OEMMN” is the Surface Pro laptop/tablet hybrid.
We’ll start with the latter first., which comes with the lower-end Snapdragon X Plus that was unveiled yesterday. Not much is known in terms of data about this, as the only statistic that was published on Geekbench is the ML score, which tests the CPU’s AI machine learning capabilities.
That’s not necessarily the most effective test, since it doesn’t touch the NPU itself, but it does show that the X Plus is slightly faster than the M3 found in the 14-inch MacBook Pro.
Moving quickly towards Surface Laptop 6, which based on core count and clock speed appears to be the mid-tier Snapdragon X Elite, we have the full Geekbench 6.3 results. And while the single-core performance of the MacBook Air M3 is, frankly, stupidly impressive (thanks to the 3nm process), the 4nm X Elite comes close and manages to toast Apple’s laptop in the performance score. multiple cores.
On top of this, both feature 16GB of DDR5 RAM, another blow to Cupertino’s choice to offer a measly 8GB as a base spec… unless Microsoft follows suit, which I pray they don’t.
The only thing I will say is to watch very closely microsoft build. It seems likely that there will be a big hardware announcement for these two laptops to usher in the era of Snapdragon X arm laptops, and other companies like Lenovo will follow suit. The silicon war is reaching a fever pitch, and Apple knows it, with sudden rumors that the M4 will appear later this year.
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