Microsoft wants to dethrone the MacBook Air: The technology giant’s ambitious goal

Microsoft is confident that it has completed the transition to Arm chips – so much so that it spent an entire day comparing its new hardware to the MacBook Air.

On a recent morning at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft representatives showed off new Surface devices equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip inside and compared them head-to-head with flagship laptops. Apple’s head. The results of these tests are why Microsoft believes they are currently in a dominant position in the laptop market.

Performance

Over the past two years, Microsoft has been secretly collaborating with all of its leading laptop partners to prepare a series of Arm-powered Windows machines that will hit the market this summer. Known as PC Copilot Plus, they aim to launch a generation of powerful, battery-efficient Windows laptops and lay the foundation for an AI-powered future.

Battery life

Microsoft believes that 87% of all app usage time on this Copilot Plus PC will be in native apps. They are still working to close down the remaining 13%, but the Prism emulator will help in the interim.

All this app compatibility and performance is nothing without battery life. Microsoft uses a script to simulate web browsing. On a 2022 Intel Surface Laptop 5, it took eight hours, 38 minutes to completely drain the battery; The new Copilot Plus Surface PC lasted twice that time, reaching 16 hours, 56 minutes.

WHO

These Copilot Plus PCs are equipped with a neural processing unit (NPU) from Qualcomm that achieves 45 TOPS of compute for AI tasks. This results in more AI task operations per watt compared to the MacBook Air M3 and Nvidia RTX 4060.

Microsoft is also integrating more than 40 AI models directly into Windows on Arm to enable new experiences within Windows and for app developers. About 10 of these are small language models that will run in the background. These models will allow developers to bring AI experiences directly into their apps, and Microsoft’s battery life measurements include them running continuously on the NPU.

It’s still too early to talk about AI features inside Windows, but Microsoft has built a new kernel and compiler for these Arm-based chips. This is an improvement at the core of Windows on Arm, making it feel faster to use and potentially opening up a wave of new AI features and applications.