What you need to know
- Several Geekbench results have been published, confirming the existence of a Surface Laptop with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite SoC.
- The benchmark results put the Surface Laptop 6 as competitive with the MacBook Pro with M3.
- Microsoft is expected to unveil an Arm-powered Surface Laptop and Surface Pro at an event on May 20.
It's been an open secret for some time, but now it's all but confirmed that a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC will power the upcoming Surface Laptop 6 for consumers. The codename for this device is OEMBR, which has now shown up on Geekbench sporting 16GB RAM and what is suspected to be the Snapdragon X Elite.
As Windows Latest correctly points out, Microsoft is using anti-leak measures to hide as many details about this device as possible, such as the name of the SoC, which has been disguised as a Snapdragon 8cx Gen3. But we know this device is rocking the mid-tier Snapdragon X Elite SoC @ 4.01GHz, and the benchmark results back this up.
Indeed, the top-tier Snapdragon X1E-84-100 Oryon CPU peaks at 4.2GHz, meaning we should see even stronger results in Geekbench and other CPU tests in laptops with that processor.
Interestingly, the benchmarks point to the chip running in a "balanced" power profile, meaning in performance mode, it could go higher (and, if that is the case, it could be the higher-tier chip).
In one Geekbench result, the Surface Laptop 6 scored an incredible 2,714 for single-core and 14,078 for multi-core. For comparison, the latest MacBook Pro with M3 Pro chip scores only marginally higher, with a 3084 single-core and 14017 multi-core score. The Surface Laptop 6 with Snapdragon X Elite will be a total beast.
This year will be the first year that Microsoft has hardware that can trade blows with Apple's MacBook lineup. The M3 and M3 Pro chips are seriously powerful, and now the Windows ecosystem will have its own chip that can stand toe-to-toe with the Mac. The Surface Laptop 6 and Surface Pro 10 are expected to be some of the first Windows devices with these new Snapdragon X chips.
In fact, the Surface Pro 10 with a Snapdragon X Plus SoC was supposed on Geekbench just days ago, confirming the existence of that device too. Both of these devices will ship with next-gen neural processing unit (NPU) silicon, which will power upcoming features such as AI Explorer.
