Trust me — we were all just as confused as you. Microsoft ushered in the next generation Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6, only for the Redmond crew to make them business-only.
But, as it turns out, this was all by design. We’ve been following Qualcomm’s breadcrumbs for a while now, and as predicted, these leaks practically confirm that we’ll get a Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 packing Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite respectively.
What does this mean for the performance and power efficiency? And more importantly, is Microsoft finally going to be at a point where they can go toe-to-toe with Apple silicon? Let’s dig deeper.
Scratching beneath the surface
So, you can see the names here. Why are we confident these are the Surface Pro 10 and Laptop 6? It comes down to the listing names, as they are consistent with how Microsoft codenames its hardware — "OEMBR OEMBR" standing for Surface Laptop, and "OEMMN OEMMN" being the laptop/tablet hybrid of the Surface Pro.
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 stat that has been posted on Geekbench is the ML Score — testing the AI Machine Learning capabilities of the CPU.
That’s not necessarily the most effective test, as it doesn’t touch on the NPU itself, but it does show the X Plus being a touch faster than the M3 found in the 14-inch MacBook Pro.
| Laptop | Geekbench ML CPU score |
|---|---|
| Surface Pro 10 | 2410 (ONNX CPU Inference Score) |
| M3 MacBook Pro | 2383 (Core ML CPU) |
Moving swiftly on over to the Surface Laptop 6, which based on the core count and clock speed looks to be the mid-tier Snapdragon X Elite, we’ve got the full Geekbench 6.3 results. And while that single-core performance of the M3 MacBook Air is, frankly, stupidly impressive (thanks to the 3nm process), the 4nm X Elite comes close and manages to toast Apple’s laptop in the multi-core score.
| Laptop | Geekbench 6 single core | Geekbench 6 multi-core |
|---|---|---|
| Surface Laptop 6 | 2714 | 14078 |
| M3 MacBook Air | 3082 | 12087 |
On top of this, both sport 16GB DDR5 RAM — another blow to Cupertino's choice to offer a paltry 8GB as the base spec... that is unless Microsoft does the same, which I pray they don't.
All I will say is, keep a very close eye on Microsoft Build. It looks likely that there will be a beefy hardware announcement coming here for these two laptops to usher in the Snapdragon X arm laptop era — with other companies like Lenovo following suit. The silicon war is reaching fever point, and Apple knows it, with sudden rumors that M4 is appearing later this year.
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- Meet Snapdragon X Plus — Qualcomm’s lower-end laptop chip that is still 10% faster than Apple M3
