Microsoft's Surface series of laptops will be updated in the coming months, but aside from the addition of OLED display technology, the big news is the optional Arm variant of the new portable PC, according to Windows Central, both the Surface Pro 10 tablet and Surface Laptop will be updated with Intel's Meteor Lake CPU later this month; the Surface Pro 10 will also feature an OLED screen.

But the really radical revision will come in June, when both products will be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite Arm CPU; this will be the first time the Surface Laptop will feature an Arm chip.

As we have previously discussed, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is touted as the first truly high-performance Arm CPU for Windows PCs, and Apple has proven that Arm-based CPUs can compete in raw performance with traditional x86 chips from Intel and AMD. with traditional x86 chips from Intel and AMD. However, existing Arm chips in Windows devices are based on ultra-low power CPU core designs and are not designed to deliver desktop-class performance.

In theory, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chip changes this situation with 12 high-performance Arm cores and performance that is claimed to be in the same rough range as Apple's latest x86 CPUs for silicon and laptops.

Whether Intel or Arm, the new portable PCs are expected to bring dramatic improvements in battery life and provide real all-day use. The Surface Laptop is also said to be undergoing a major redesign with a slimmer screen bezel, a tactile touchpad, improved port selection including a USB-C socket, and, inevitably, the addition of a Microsoft-only Copilot button on the keyboard It is said that.

Of course, Microsoft's Surface machines are not the only ones to feature Qualcomm's new chips. New Windows laptops with this new CPU are expected to appear this year.

One such device appears to be a Lenovo laptop that appeared in the Geekbench results database: registered as the Lenovo 83ED, the device scored 1,628 points in the Geekbench 6.2 single-core test and 11,392 points, a rather disappointing score compared to Qualcomm's claims.

Qualcomm claims that the chip performs 2,777 single-threaded and 14,056 multithreaded points at 23 watts, and 2,966 and 15,239 points at 80 watts, respectively The Geekbench data has some anomalies in terms of operating frequency. Since there appear to be some anomalies in terms of operating frequency, these results are probably not representative of the final capabilities of the X Elite chip.

However, we will soon find out, as there will almost certainly be a number of notebooks with Qualcomm's supposed new x86 killer chip on the market this summer. One question that remains is how well the new combination of Windows and Qualcomm CPUs will handle legacy x86 code.

Apple has managed this transition particularly well with its silicon. But it just needs to control the entire hardware and software stack and make it all work well on a relatively small number of devices, and since the Windows ecosystem is much busier and messier, for better or worse, this new generation of Qualcomm-powered Windows on Arm devices will be interesting to see how well they perform in legacy x86 emulation as well as in Arm native code.

It would be no exaggeration to say that its success, and the future of x86 versus Arm as a whole, depends on the latter. Of course, even if common x86 code works well on the new device, the game will be a completely different, well, game. What would be really interesting would be Arm PCs with powerful discrete GPUs like those from Nvidia and AMD. Watch for.